"But I formed my own judgement as a boy at that time because I knew Germans in the northern border area where we had relatives, because my aunt and her son had a confectionery in Měcholupy near Žatec, and that was also a village that was mostly inhabited by Germans. And I recognized that there were differences in the coexistence of Czechs and Germans, in different parts of the country. While in the south the relations were mostly friendly, because there was also a very poor population, the north was completely different, it was richer, there was industry, there were factories, and there also the German population behaved more haughtily towards the Czech people than anywhere else."
"The stations we were changing at, those were in cities that were already badly damaged. There it was impossible to even go into the streets, for example Dresden. They were no longer streets, they were just piles of rubble with a road laboriously made in between so that you could walk or drive. So it was suspicious if we walked among the rubble, it was impossible. So sometimes we had to wait there on a bench at the station, and that almost backfired once because suddenly a military check came. So we said, that's it. But we were lucky, and that luck, you can't be without it, it saved us. Because they started checking a few more young men who were sitting next to us. They were some members of the so-called Hitler Youth, who probably didn't have it all right, because the soldiers looked at their papers and didn't like them, so they took them with them and took them away for questioning. And of course we took advantage of that and we packed up in a hurry so that we could hide."
Karel Růžička was born on 31 July 1924 in Prague, where he lived all his life. His father came from Vienna, his mother from Arad in Romania, but both were Czech. He had a sister nine years older. The family would go to the border region of Šumava for holidays. When they went there in the summer of 1938, people were already spitting and throwing stones at them. Karel Růžička graduated from the grammar school in Prague’s Vinohrady district in 1943. In March 1944, he was ordered to join forced labour at the Junkers factory in Magdeburg. They worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and were paid disproportionately less than workers from Germany. During 1944, air raids on the city increased, supplies of materials were delayed and work was often not done. After an air raid in September 1944, the workers were moved to Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, where the Nazis set up a large complex of underground factories. In October 1944, Karl and a friend managed to escape and, after various vicissitudes, reached Prague. There they signed up to work in a branch of the Junkers factory in Modřany, where they stayed until the end of the war. In May 1945, Karel Růžička joined the Prague Uprising. After the war he graduated from the University of Economics and the University of Civil Engineering. He worked first as a planner in a mine design office, then in the state administration, where he stayed until his retirement. After 1989, he became involved in the Forced Labor Union where he served first as Vice President and later as President. He organised exhibitions and discussions with the Union not only at home but also abroad.
