My father had been held by the Nazis for years. Only after the Velvet Revolution did he talk about what he had been through
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Slavomír Klika was born on 5 February 1951 in Domanín, South Bohemia. His father, Slavomír Klika, had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 due to his involvement in sabotage in a factory in Čakovice. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis in the Pankrác Prison in Prague and then in the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt where he lived to see the liberation. He had been smuggling notes from the Theresienstadt fortress on which the book ‘Catacombs of Theresienstadt’ (‘Terezínské katakomby’) has been based. His mother, Marie, lived through the war on a family farm in Domanín. In the 1950s, his family had been forced to join an agricultural co-op. To meet quotas they had to buy eggs and milk at a local shop in Domanín. In the 1960s, his parents bought a house in Lásenice and had been working at the local agricultural co-op. Slavomír Klika had been working at the coop as a driver’s assistant and a driver, later, he got a job as a bus driver. In 1979, he joined the Communist Party as he had been promised a flat by the Party. In 2021, he had been living in the city of Jindřichův Hradec.
