Kazimír Morozovič

* 1937

  • “It was in 1943 in Yefremov. That’s where the paratrooper brigade was formed. Paratroopers were being trained there, and we, children, were going to the place and watching them as they were jumping from hot air balloons. Strong winds blew there, and when they hit the ground, the wind always dragged them over the field and we thought it was funny. The children’s home was in a large block of houses. Half of it had been bombed out and the other half was quite fine, and so we all lived there. I spent about half the time in the children’s home and the other half with my parents. They were in Yefremov in the replacement regiment and they were part of the children’s home. My father was in charge of all food supplies there, and my mother worked in the kitchen.” Interviewer: “Tell us how it was there for you, when you were a six- or seven-year-old child?” “I had to go to school there. Svoboda ordered this. All children had to go to school there so that they would not be like savages. And there was a lot of space where we could play. There was the adjacent house with a burnt ground next to it. We did not miss anything. We were roaming the place, climbing on the ruins which were left from the house... it was wonderful.”

  • “In order to tell you precisely – we kept moving westward. From Buzuluk we travelled by trucks. These were horrible Russian trucks. But later we got two vehicles, probably from the front, and they were the American Studebakers. Well, they were big for me – the large rear wheels… This way we were gradually moving forward. When the entire children’s home was then being transported and we could not fit into the trucks, we travelled in railway carriages. We got cattle cars and we lived in them. We slept in them, travelled in them... Sometimes we would stop somewhere for food, and some meal would be cooked. We would spend a week or a fortnight in some railway station and then we would move again a bit further. There were so called officers’ carriages; they were regular train cars, whereas the rank-and-file soldiers and children had cattle cars. But one or two nights later after riding in the officers’ cars, all the officers moved into our cars. The cattle cars were comfortably fitted with straw on the floor and you could get a wonderful sleep there, while the officers had to sit on wooden benches. They were all smashed up and eventually they furnished their carriages in the same way as us.”

  • “I admired him, because I always got up really early in the morning, and so did he. In summer he used to go to exercise in the garden, and he ran and exercised there. In winter he rubbed his body with snow. He washed his face and his body with snow. I thought: I will do that, too. I thus ran out and I ran around twice, it was in winter and I was barefoot, and I could endure this, but I could not endure washing myself with snow. That was something terrible and I said to myself afterwards that I would never go out to exercise again. It was so freezing cold there that whenever I went out, my mom dressed me properly before she let me go. When there was minus ten or twenty degrees centigrade, it was considered warm.”

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Our whole family strove hard, but we fell back into the mess that we had been in before

Kazimir Morozovič
Kazimir Morozovič
zdroj: Morozovič

Kazimír Morozovič was born January 12, 1937 in the village Rudňa Novenka near the town Shepetivka in Ukraine to Růžena and Lucian Morozovič. His father was Ukrainian and his mother came from Třeboň in southern Bohemia. They lived in Ukraine and they spoke Russian, Ukrainian and Polish at home. Kazimír had two older sisters: Vanda (1925) and Věra (1929) Biněvská. They were born to Kazimír‘s mother Růžena Morozovičová during her first marriage, which ended in her husband‘s death in 1934. Fearing retaliation from the Stalin‘s regime, Lucian Morozovič moved the family to a place near Buzuluk in the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1941, but in spite of this, he was arrested for unknown reasons and sentenced to about fifteen years of imprisonment. Urged by the daughter Vanda, in 1942-1945 the rest of the family joined the 1st Czechoslovak army corps in Buzuluk which fought alongside the Red Army on the eastern front in the USSR. Heliodor Píka subsequently managed to negotiate Lucian Morozovič‘s release from prison and he brought him to Buzuluk. Mr. and Mrs. Morozovič were taking care of the commander‘s house of general Svoboda in Buzuluk, and later they moved to Yefremov with the replacement battalion. A children‘s home for children of the soldiers was part of this battalion. Kazimír describes his war experiences from the perspective of a six-year-old boy. The family settled in Prague after the war. Kazimír‘s father was decorated for his activity during the war and he received a trade certificate to operate a tobacconist‘s shop, which eventually resulted in his being labelled as an exploiter by the communist regime after 1948. Although his father died in 1951, Kazimír was not allowed to study due to his family‘s class origin.