Rudolf Křivánek

* 1934

  • "The day before [before the deportation to Bărăgan], my brother and I were in Bošňák [New Moldavia] for a Baptist baptism, and when we arrived in the morning, everything was fine. In the afternoon we left and there were cars driving around Bošňák, here and there, carrying nothing. We thought there was going to be a war, there was always talk of war. And we came home and by morning they had evicted the people from St Helena. There were more, they were from Bosňak, only not from Coronini, otherwise they were taken from all the villages."

  • "And I was there until about eleven o'clock and then the Securitate, the police from Bošňák [Nová Moldava], came and investigated me. They sat me down like you did today, and they put a chair in front of me, and on it was a stand with a lamp with a five-hundred-pound bulb on it that shone in my eyes. They examined me from eleven to three at night. A captain told me to talk, because the army had taken over the whole village, otherwise the stools would fly on the ceiling."

  • "Two of them grabbed the hatchet, I held the axe and they turned it in my hand. They cut me in the palm of my hand, it stuck in there and blood flowed. The other hand, as they turned it, they cut my hand and I let it [the axe] go. They took it and gave it to a Mlejnek from Helena, who took it and ran with it into the street. There were others from Coronini, a certain Daneck, and when he saw that they were taking the axe from me, he ran away so that he would not have to testify."

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    Cheb, 10.11.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:01:13
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Look at my palms, the scars remind me of collectivization

Rudolf Krivanek after his arrival in Czechoslovakia, 1963
Rudolf Krivanek after his arrival in Czechoslovakia, 1963
photo: archive of a witness

Rudolf Křivánek was born on 14 December 1934 in St. Helena, a Czech village in the Romanian Banat. He grew up in a large and religious family, his grandfather was the founder and first preacher of the Baptist congregation in St. Helena. Brother Josef escaped to Yugoslavia during World War II and joined the underground resistance, was eventually imprisoned and after the liberation of Czechoslovakia settled in the borderlands, where his other brothers followed him. After 1945, his father served as mayor of the village and was instrumental in its reconstruction. In June 1951, the Křiváneks were threatened with deportation to the Bărăgan region, where the Communist Party of Romania had concentrated class enemies, but their father’s intervention averted the displacement. At a time of escalated Yugoslav-Soviet relations, the witness had to compulsorily join a riot patrol that oversaw security in the village and protected it from incursions by neighboring enemies. During the establishment of the unified agricultural cooperative, the Krivaneks became victims of persecution. In one incident, the witness was physically assaulted, injured with an axe, and subsequently held and interrogated by the state secret police, the Securitate. Following these incidents, his parents gave up their fields to the cooperative and requested to emigrate to Czechoslovakia, where the deceased and his family left in 1963. They first lived with his parents in Cheb and later got their own place. The witness got a job in a housing cooperative, where he worked as a maintenance worker and a heating engineer. He celebrated his 90th birthday in 2023 and was living in Cheb at the time of filming (November 2023).