"I went to Náměstí Svobody, I walked into the crowd, I stood and listened. And then a man comes up behind me and says, 'Doctor, that's beautiful, isn't it?' A do you know who it was? The chief of the secret police from Lenin Street. And that was a shock of the first order for me, and I left without a word, and I was in ferment inside."
"I took away two lessons from it: that there are classes in society, not antagonistic classes, but layers, and that there is someone who wants to control the relationship between those layers. And there was always this socialist revolution and internationalism, and it struck me as something absolutely strange, but which didn't concern me, because we felt international. We were brought up in a German school, we spoke German and we spoke Czech. So the 'internationalism' didn't manifest itself in us in any way, on the contrary, the roots of a certain dissatisfaction with the new situation were constantly being sown, and this was due to the fact that it was impossible to visit our relatives in West Germany. There was hardly a family there that did not have war invalids, the dead, prisoners and relatives somewhere in Germany. And that was suddenly abolished. And everybody cried out that this is freedom and suddenly this."
"There was a lot of Germanness, because the 1918-20 class was drafted into the Wehrmacht, so there was a big cry. It was a complete disaster, we lived in a house where there was a post office on the ground floor, and when this mail bus came and brought out a box or a bag, the postmistress would divide it up and now there was this long envelope and on it was the heading 'Oberkommando der deutschen Wehrmacht'. In front of the house there were these women with children in their arms whose husbands were in the war. And when she came out without the paper, it was comforting. But when she came out with the paper, there was tension about who had fallen, because it was an announcement that they had disappeared or fallen or something. And what I remember from that is the screaming and the loud crying of those women, those wives with those children, standing there on the road, now that group of women are breaking up, one crying, one not crying..."
Rudolf Šrámek was born on 15 January 1934 in Ostrava, but he comes from the village of Hošťálkovice (today a local part of Ostrava) in the Hlučín region. This region had a specific position within the former Czechoslovakia, as it was part of Prussian Silesia from 1742-1920 and was annexed to the Great German Empire after the Munich Agreement in October 1938. This resulted in local men having to enlist as Reich citizens in the Wehrmacht, which also affected several of Rudolf Šrámek’s relatives. For many years the official language was German and the local population spoke a specific dialect based on Czech, Polish and German. The complex national and linguistic situation predetermined the witness’s lifelong career as a linguist. Rudolf Šrámek graduated from the general school and the first two grades of the gymnasium in German, and he did not fully master written Czech until he was 13 years old. After graduating from the gymnasium in Hlučín, he studied Czech and Russian at the Brno Faculty of Philosophy, where he graduated in 1958. Until 1993 he worked at the Institute for the Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (since 1993 the CAS), where he researched Czech dialects and especially proper names. He also taught at universities in Brno and Ostrava. Although he had several political difficulties during the normalisation period and even found himself in the viewfinder of State Security, he was allowed several trips abroad. In the field of linguistics, Rudolf Šrámek made a significant contribution to the development of onomastics, the study of proper names. In 2024, the witness, still professor emeritus of Masaryk University, lived in Brno.
