“This happened when my dad had his motorbike. He kept it in the former chapel across the road from the Štekl Hotel. And he often used to ride after dark. One day he was riding down the original road through Bavorovice – it’s no longer there, now there’s a different road round that way – and he encountered an unlit carriage pulled by some farming animals. The result was that the carriage and the cattle were left unharmed, but my dad suffered a few broken bones and some cuts and grazes. Most importantly, due to his injuries, he developed so-called phlegmon in his arm, which is an inflammation of soft tissue, often resulting in amputation. The phlegmon got bigger and bigger. Naturally, he saw a doctor about it and in the end said: ‘Doctor, I can’t bear the pain any longer.’ This was already at the hospital, and he was speaking to the senior consultant, who said: ‘There’ll be an end to the pain tomorrow.’ My dad was petrified, and he said: ‘Sir, are you planning to amputate my arm?’ And the consultant just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘I can’t see any other way.’ My father panicked, and since his colleagues from the office kept coming to visit, he explained to them what was happening. They immediately informed the prince of Schwarzenberg. And you know what he did? He had some hard-to-get medicine flown from Switzerland. This medicine was some form of proto penicillin (sulphonamides). Dad later recalled he was getting different kids of injections, and that he had reached a crisis during which he thought he saw, or he actually saw, some light and he was thinking to himself: ‘So far so good, as long as I can see it, I’m still alive.’ His arm remained covered in scars and the elbow had lost its flexibility, which would serve as a reminder of the accident for the rest of his days, but he survived, and his arm healed.”
“I can still subconsciously hear the roar of the aircraft which bombed České Budějovice, which me and my parents heard while we were walking to the view by the Hluboká castle orangery. That’s where we stood and watched. I can still hear the racket of those Allies’ planes which attacked České Budějovice; the explosions, detonations and so on. That’s what stuck in my mind at the time. As soon as it was over, my dad jumped on his motorbike and rushed to Budějovice because that’s where my mum’s parents lived, right next to the railway. Granddad had co-built a cooperative flat there. When he arrived, he found out that only about two to three houses down, a bomb had hit, full impact. So fortunately, the house where my mum’s parents were living had been spared. I can also remember an anecdote from the event, something of a funny story. Some old grandpa had leapt out of his house and started poking an unexploded bomb with his cane, knocking at it and saying: ‘What is it, this? What is it?’ So they had to catch the old boy and drag him away.”
Stanislav Kahuda was born on April 11, 1942, in České Budějovice. His father was the manager of the central House-of-Schwarzenberg office in Hluboká nad Vltavou. His mother Anna Kahudová, née Puchernová, was a trained teacher but for political reasons was prevented from practising her profession. Following the communist coup in 1948, after the Schwarzenberg property had been nationalised, the family was forced to move to Třeboň. Here, the father worked as an accountant in a brewery which used to belong to the House of Schwarzenberg but was likewise appropriated by the communist state. The mother worked as a clerk in the painter cooperative Lakoma. The parents’ income was considerably low, and the family struggled to make ends meet. Despite the difficult times, Stanislav Kahuda remembers his childhood in Třeboň fondly. After primary school, he went to a civil engineering secondary school and later graduated from the university of agriculture. He has done a variety of different jobs, working as a civil engineer, project architect, cultural manager, and teacher. Stanislav Kahuda and his wife have two sons: the elder one, also a Stanislav, is a teacher at a music school and a successful musician; the younger one, Tomáš, is a renowned historian specialising in Thirty Years’ War. In 2022 at the time of the interview, Stanislav Kahuda was living in České Budějovice.
