Václav Němeček

* 1938

  • "In gassing, wherever there is flour, moths stick, so that's what the gassing company did. They came a week before, they taped up the windows and all the accesses to the mill, the doors, the pipes, because this is where the flour was blowing into the bakery, so it was split and taped up. And when the actual gassing with the gas started, they were already in masks distributing the cardboard boxes to the mixing plant, to the bagging plant where the empty bags were stored, to the cleaning plant and to the silo, everywhere, and then they went in masks from the top down and emptied the boxes on the floor. They backed out and sealed the doors, put barriers around the mill. The company kept watching it to make sure no one went in there."

  • "The millers were removing the flour bridges that were left and the flour was not falling. So they had to poke it from underneath with these curved pipes, and what didn't go in had to go in. And the way it was done was by lowering a rope ladder that was threaded through the top of the beam, and one stayed at the top of that, and the other climbed down girded with a carabiner, latched onto that ladder, and had a long stick in his hand with a spatula attached to it, and with that he tried to poke and cut the vault at a distance somewhere so that it would fall down. The ladder couldn't go low, so the flour wouldn't push it down, it would sometimes fall down. And then to climb out again and lower the ladder when something was hanging there, when the dust, the flour had settled. And that was done a lot, everybody didn't climb it. It had to be guarded at the top, a lamp was put on. And when it fell, it was a blower up." - "I'm sure it was dangerous." - "It was life and death in there. You had to know how to do it and give it what it wanted."

  • "I was hauling a field with a cow gate over the road and I ended up going home across the road. A car came, some gentlemen, and they came out to the car and took mum out with them. I drove past, still pulling the wagon with the gates in front of them. So I just looked at her and thought they were bothering her again, and they drove off without saying anything. And mom wasn't there, all of a sudden." - "What were you doing? Did you look for her?"-"Then she stayed away and I went to the army, so I wanted to talk to her some more. Where is she, what is it? So I went to Pardubice, and nobody told me she wasn't there. I didn't find out where they took her or what was going on. Only then did my brother get in touch with me, he followed me to the army, and we went together from Frenštát to Želiezovce to the prison. We waited there all night and in the morning they brought her in and we just exchanged a few words. Mum had written earlier to ask us to send her some cigarettes. We knew she didn't smoke, but she had that for Zdeňka, who was there too. But they didn't bring her there, just mom."

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    Hradec Králové, 06.06.2023

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My mother was arrested, I didn’t know why or where. And I had to go to the army

Václav Němeček in 1957
Václav Němeček in 1957
photo: archive of a witness

Václav Němeček was born on 6 March 1938 in the mill in Trhová Kamenice to Jarmila and Václav Němeček. He had three brothers and the youngest sister. His father died tragically in 1941 while maintaining the mill, leaving his mother to work and raise four children alone. And since the grinding never stopped and the children had to help in the mill, they all learned the trade at home. Nevertheless, fifteen-year-old Václav Němeček entered the milling school in Pardubice. By that time, the mill was no longer theirs; like other trades, it was absorbed by the controlled socialist economy and Němeček’s mill was transferred to the Jihlava Mills and later to Pardubice Mills. In 1953 it was the last mill to be milled. In 1957, the mother Jarmila Němečková was sentenced to five years and the residential part of the mill was confiscated. Václav Němeček left for basic military service and after his return he joined the Automatic Mills in Pardubice, which was undergoing reconstruction. He soon took up the position of mill foreman at Automatické mlýny and stayed with the company until the 1990s, when the mills were privatised. Václav Němeček became one of the ten co-owners of the company AMPA (Automatické mlýny Pardubice). Unfortunately, due to the fraudulent behaviour of one of the co-owners of AMPA, the largest mill in East Bohemia was lost. Václav Němeček left Automatické mlýny after forty-four years in 2004. He is married, has four children and lived in Pardubice in 2024.