Karel Zub

* 1937

  • „On that day, I had to meet my cousin at the main square, the plan to go to her workplace where she worked as a lab technician, that she would draw my blood and check it because at that time, I had some heart problems. My eyesight had worsened, too. I was waiting for her at the square, the trams stopped going, those which went across the Saský bridge up towards the Lochotín neighbourhood. Out of sudden, I heard somewhat stronger noise, what was happening? And there was a crowd going down the Prešovská street, towards the square. I did not know what was going on. So, they got in front of the city hall. I was a curious lad so I went to have a look, I was sixteen. And I saw that there were things being flung out of the windows, paintings and various other things which they were throwing down on the pavement and then it got set on fire. And it was sort of pretty busy, there had to be quite some chaos at the town hall. And the cops came in a car. I think it was a Škoda, not sure, convertible, without a roof. And the crowd turned the car on the side so that the cops couldn’t go away. And how it continued then… The cops probably walked away because they could get some more than they had expected. I don’t know how long did that take. I was interested so I was watching. I stood at the church wall. I had quite a good idea about the events and when it got calmed down and people started gossiping that there should be the Ministry of Interior army coming from Prague, the so-called Inner Guard, that indeed had some effect, people started to worry when they saw they wouldn’t reach any goals. And the police was not letting anyone to the square any more. They blocked the streets around and they did not let anyone pass any further, so I thought to myself: ‘What now, it probably ended already.’ The cousin did not come at all, I knew where she worked so I thought, I could as well walk across the Saský bridge to Lochotín to the medical school where she could get the blood work done.”

  • "Whoever happened to be around, they were let on the truck and they would drive us around. Even a lady with a basket of hay and a scythe was invited to jump on the truck. I remember that we encountered chewing gum and chocolate, we had not seen it during the war. Sometimes, we got some chocolate from the soldiers."

  • "I know that father was well informed about the war progress because he listened to London [radio broadcasst]. And so did I, I was nosy. I did not know that so I called dad: 'Daddy, daddy, gasoline calling!' [gasoline - benzín in Czech, rhymes with Londýn, Czech exonym for London] instead of London. It could have become even... If they found out. Because those who listened to foreign broadcast, those were arrested and went straight to concentration camp. Many people lost their lives there."

  • "There's this outstanding memory of mine. The Gestapo arrested dad and when we managed to get him out of prison, we couldn't recognise him, he was so bad off health-wise. They damaged his spine, then he got cancer in the 10th vertebra and after ten years [in 1962], he died."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Plzeň, 23.08.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:15:07
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Life was gradually getting worse, the Commies could only destroy all the things

Karel Zub's photograph from a member card of the Czechoslovak Sports' Union
Karel Zub's photograph from a member card of the Czechoslovak Sports' Union
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Karel Zub was born on the 1st of January in 1937 in Vřeskovice in the Klatovy region. In 1943, he started going to the local school. At the age of eight, in May 1945, he witnessed the liberation of Vřeskovice by the United States army. After the 1948 Communist coup d’état, the Zub smallholding was confiscated, the parents were forced to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative and Karel’s father was not allowed to run his cabinet making worhskop. In 1953, they also lost the family savings in the monetary reform. Karel Zub was 16 at that time and on the 1st of June, he witnessed the so-called Uprising, mass protests against the monetary reform. From a safe distance, he observed how paintings were being thrown out of the windows of the city hall and set on fire, how the demonstration participants turn over the police cars and how they were arrested en masse. During the 1950’s, Karel Zub went to a trade school and apprenticed in cabinet making and later he studied at teachers’ institute. In 1968, during the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, he worked as a construction site supervisor in Stod nera ply. In September 1968, he started to teach at the trade school for construction works in Plzeň. At the time of recording (2019), he lived in his birthplace, Vřeskovice.