Milan Kluc

* 1938  †︎ 2023

  • "When [the cop] returned, he told me that my behavior was incompatible and that I had to reconsider everything, where I belong and what I would do. In conclusion, he told me - I hope, comrade, that we will not see each other again. Actually, next time our meeting might not turn out so well. I understood it and I searched who might have betrayed me. It must have been one of the drivers from the heater who was lying on the bench pretending to be asleep.”

  • "Tanks and wheeled armored personnel carriers passed through Most in the direction from Horní Jiřetín, where [Soviet soldiers] demolished one bridge and a house. Because they slipped and tore down the house, completely, they got inside. They [Soviet soldiers] were pointed Podžatecká to our windows. I was standing in a line for bread so many times, because [Soviet soldiers] confiscated bread in bakeries. Major Svítok, a politruk from the barracks of the Most strike, lived next to me. He was twice able to refuse to let Soviet troops into the barracks, he was a friend of mine. We celebrated New Year's Eve together, he was childless. And my son felt like at home at his place. It took less than a month, I met him near a house, in the evening, he was pale, there were tears in his eyes and he told me that they had to let them into the barracks."

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    Most, 26.10.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 52:36
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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During the totalitarianism, he was not afraid to tell the truth. He had problems at work, he lost friends

Milan Kluc in 1958
Milan Kluc in 1958
photo: archive of the witness

Milan Kluc was born on July 27, 1938 in the now non-existing Libkovice near Duchcov into a railway family. He started school in 1944 in Klánovice near Prague, where he moved with his parents before the occupation of the Czech border by Nazi Germany in October 1938. His father Václav took part in the May Uprising, where he was seriously injured. At the end of August 1945, the family returned to Libkovice. The communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 changed Milan’s life. A year later, as a schoolboy, he noticed the exchange of teachers for the people that were in the Communist party and only took a quick course. He knew they were not telling the truth, and he had arguments with them. After the military service in 1956, he started working as a fireman on a locomotive in a depot in Most and began to have problems with his superiors. He got married in 1959, and he had a daughter and a son with his wife Helga. After the occupation of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 and the return to normalization, he had various discussions with his colleagues, he did not hide his disappointment. But soon he regretted it. In May 1969, he was called to the National Security Corps and interrogated. He was accused of ruining the discipline on the railway and his behavior was in a contradiction with the socialist establishment. In 2020 he was a widower and lived in Most, his native Libkovice became the last Czech village demolished due to coal mining in the early 1990s. Milan Kluc died on October 19, 2023.