The last Czechs in the Sudetes
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Josef Malecký was born on 30 July 1931 in Nová Ves, Louny District. But she grew up in the farming village of Hraničné Petrovice near Šternberk, where her parents bought a farm with 38 hectares of fields and forest. He lived through World War II in the German village and is now its last living pre-war inhabitant. He witnessed the Nazi occupation, the bombing of the village, the retreat of German soldiers and advance of Soviet ones, the violence perpetrated against the local Germans and their expulsion. After 1948 the family refused to join the local agricultural cooperative. And so in October 1951 Josef Malecký was assigned to the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (forced labour masquerading as military service - trans.) where he spent 28 months as cheap labour. In 1956 the family finally gave in to pressure and joined its lands into the state farm where the witness then worked as a tractor driver until his retirement. After the fall of Communism, the family retrieved its lands, and Josef Malecký’s grandson has been farming them privately for several years now. Josef Malecký died on 9 October 2020.
