Karel Valenta

* 1945

  • "It's like being born in Terezín. These were military towns where the garrison was, where the entire families of all the employees of that garrison lived in the fort. The entrance to the city was from Jaroměř up the hill and the exit was from the other side towards Rasošky. Otherwise it was closed, surrounded, there were hides all around. It was exactly what a fortress built under Franz Josef should look like.'

  • „The year 1989 was quite a significant for me, because I was just returning from the Nuremberg symposium. When we arrived in Prague by bus, it snowed really heavily. We had no idea what was going on here. It was already heaving in Prague. At night I slept at my aunts, my mother's sister. Early in the morning, I hurried to the Krkonoše Mountains, where my grandmother had a full hotel and was there all alone to keep it working.“

  • „The 'liberators' came to us - Russians, Bulgarians, Germans. Mainly the Russians located their tanks in front of important buildings like radio, main post office, parliament and the like. There was martial law from the evening, no one was allowed to go out. Since we lived above the museum, we could see both the museum and the radio station from above the roof. At night there was shooting with those light cartridges. It was no fun at all.“

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Stráž nad Nisou, 28.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:32:55
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Keep a straight face

Karel Valenta in the Great Britain (1967)
Karel Valenta in the Great Britain (1967)
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Karel Valenta was born on March 27, 1945 in the Josefovská fortress, near Jaroměř. He spent the first seven years of his life there with his grandfather, the legionnaire František Palaš. He suffered from polio in his childhood. Hippotherapy also helped him to recover. In 1952, Karel moved to Prague with his parents, where he started elementary school. After completing primary education, he studied at a hotel secondary school. He worked in various positions in hotels until his retirement. He also met his future wife at work. They later raised three sons together. In 1968, he lived in Prague‘s Vinohrady, so he had a direct view of the battle for Czechoslovak Radio during the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops from his window. He spent the years of normalization with his family without major problems. After the Velvet Revolution, he started running a business. In 2022, he lived in Stráž nad Nisou.