Josef Hora

* 1928

  • "In the year forty-eight, there was a great rally. It was a truly memorable, anti-communist gathering. There we practiced the song The Faithful Remained. There was a recitation. 'Not the gains, no glory. Not born yet in brotherhood we carry our fate. Selfishness, lies and lack of freedom" - and all of us: 'WASTE!' "Brotherhood, truth, republic" - and all of us: "SUCCESS!" And we began to practice. It was marvellous rally.”

  • "In the year 1945 after the war, when Sokol was restored in Kladno, I started going there as a teenager. It was supposed to be of great interest and it would be necessary to expand the Sokol training centre, so they already had a plan. There was a builder, whose name was Emil Marcín, and he had a plan in place to complete the centre. He intended the hall would be expanded by an area as large as the training hall, so in 1947 the centre was built and I worked part-time there. It regarded the older members, in their working years, thirty, thirty-five, fifty, drove to one of Kladno's mines, where certain galleries had once been walled up in order to prevent possible floods once. There was no danger anymore, so they used to come there to get the bricks out. Another, who was also a member of Sokol and had road transport, he drove it to the construction site, one truck after another. A voluntary working obligation was announced; anyone who passed by and had two hours or half a day free, could sit down, there were small chairs, axes available, and cleaned the bricks. And they left them in the pile again. We were teenagers at the time, and the builder explained to us: 'Here it will be built in this line, so make a stack of bricks from this line about two or three meters.'"

  • "In the year 1962, they liquidated the whole of Újezd, as I said, there are maybe three hundred people, the shops and so on. They issued a special decree, and the district confirmed that it would be bought. So it was bought and were there houses, perhaps built a long time ago, made of stone, had two rooms and a courtyard, so they got – people agreed amongst each other - for example they got forty or fifty thousand. Our house was estimated by Mr. Kaše to be worth a certain amount, I believe it was two hundred and fifty thousand crowns. Then there was an acreage from the district national committee that because the monetary reform was in the year 1953, so that my mother would get forty-three thousand five hundred for the house. Our of that she had thirty thousand in a tied deposit; in a year she could withdraw an amount, I don't know, maybe three or five thousand. She just couldn't pick it all up, or get a big sum at once. For the thirteen thousand that was left, she had to get her own apartment."

  • "In the beginning, Dr. Telner, a Polish lawyer, came to our kitchen, put a purchase agreement on the table, and said to the mother: 'Sign it.' Mom said: 'I will not do that.' Then he took out his gun and said: ´It is within my powers to shoot you all here.´ And he fired the pistol into the flowerpot. Mom didn't sign, so he packed it up and left. It was at the end of the year 1942. On the 23 March 1943 a group of people from Poldi factory came to our house and moved us out, quite literally on the street. They came to the stove wearing gloves, turned on the water, put out the fire, took the hot stove and carried it out on the street. A closet, a made bed, everything out on the street."

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    Kladno, 27.11.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:40:44
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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We built a Sokol centre made of bricks from Kladno mines

At the family estate in 1937
At the family estate in 1937
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Josef Hora was born on February 24, 1928 in Újezd near Kladno. His family farmed on land near the expanding Kladno smelter Poldi. Josef went to Sokol from 1935. He had a sister and a brother, their father died in 1936. In 1939 the family built an apartment building no. 966 to invest money in uncertain times of war. In 1943, the family was evicted from the farm due to the expansion of the Poldi smelter, and Horas received compensation in the form of securities deposited with the State Bank. In May 1945, Josef Hora experienced the liberation by the Red Army. In the years 1943 - 1947 he graduated from the Secondary Industrial School in Kladno. He participated in XI. All-Sokol Rally in 1948. After 1948, the family was given the securities that it received in 1943 as compensation for the confiscated farm and land. Until 1950, Josef worked in the company Hrabě Lozovský in Zličín, then for almost 40 years in Polda Kladno as a clerk in the Production and Dispatching Department. He got married in 1954 and had two children. In 1962, his family was forced to move out again, this time from house no. 966; the family received for the house and land only about a fifth of the estimated price. Josef has been retired since 1988 and is devoted to his family, hiking, traveling and practicing in Sokol.