examples – 11 – The homecomer Josef K.

The Homecomer Josef K.

Josef K., a Bohemian chauffeur, was sentenced in 1946 by the so-called People’s Courts of Czechoslovakia to ten years of forced labor, which he was forced to serve in various prisons throughout Czechoslovakia (CSSR). He returned to his family in a strange city in 1956 and took his own life six months later.

Family K. in the year 1936 in Bohemia/CSSR

“My father was… what’s the word?… ”

“Denounced?”

“Yes. Denounced.”

“A farmer claimed that in 1938, during the ‘Anschluss,’ when the shootings broke out in Haberspirk, Josef shot a Czech policeman. But that wasn’t true. My father had to pick me up from Karlovy Vary on his moped, which was available to him at the facility. Nothing was running because of the Anschluss and the shootings. My father wasn’t even in Haberspirk. So my mother went to the farmer and begged him on her knees to retract his statement, but he said he couldn’t take back what he had said. We had nothing to do with the politics of… Greater Germany. We weren’t interested in that at all.”