Roman Watzinger

* 1929

  • "The son of the Minister of Energetics crashed his car and he was going to Yugoslavia for a fortnight on holiday. And so if we are able to fix it. So they brought it in on Monday, we had a fortnight to do it, but by Friday we had already sent him a telegram in the morning that he could come and get the car, it was ready. And that's how I met the minister. And he had a visitor one day, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan, came to Karlovy Vary for a week - and he asked me that he couldn't be there for the whole week, so if I could attend to him. So I took a vacation, the head of the custom office car, and that's just how we took care of him and his wife. And when the final interview was, the minister asked me what I was doing if I didn't speak Czech, I mean, like the Prague people, and things like that. So I told him that I was from South Moravia and that I wanted to come back one day anyway. And that's all. About a fortnight later I was invited to an interview with the Minister, the Director General of Energetics was there. If I was hired, what would I like to do, and I had experience in hydroelectric power plants, so when Dalešice was being built, I would go and work there. They said no, but they just moved me to Brno to be the personnel director and I did that for sixteen years."

  • "I discovered a smokehouse down by the playground. So I opened it up and found that there were sausages hanging up and smoking. Well, of course, some sausages, because there was no such thing to eat at home, so I just took a few. And we used to go to Vinohrady, the bunch of us that used to play that football, and we shared them there. You weren't allowed to bring anything home, because that would be a problem. And one time there weren't even sausages, but there was a big smoked leg, and I took the leg, put it under my shirt like this, burned my whole belly, and we split the leg up in Vinohrady, and we had a good time."

  • "The essentials were loaded and off we went. In October, it was drizzly and we drove towards Šumná, then towards Blížkovice. At about five o'clock, it was getting dark, a soldier came on a motorcycle and announced: 'Get the wagons back immediately. We're going to liquidate the army in the area that won't be seized.' So what was done was simply that they put everything we had on the wagon in the ditch between Šumna and Štítara. Well, and my mother was now in charge of what to do next. So she picked herself up and walked to the border to see my father what to do. And we stayed there - two sisters and me. It was drizzling, so to keep us out of the rain, we had an open closet and we just survived there all night, and my mother didn't come back until about four o'clock in the afternoon the next day, and she came in with a coachman and a ladder truck."

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    Vranov nad Dyjí, 12.12.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:23:44
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Planes flew overhead and we played football

Roman Watzinger in his youth
Roman Watzinger in his youth
photo: archive of a witness

Roman Watzinger was born on 28 September 1929 in the village of Trstěnice near Moravský Krumlov. Soon the family moved to Vranov nad Dyjí, where Roman’s father got a job in a power plant. In 1938, after the signing of the Munich Agreement, the family had to leave home in a hurry. They spent a few months in a restaurant in Pavlice and at the end of the year they moved to Brno, where his father got a job. Roman spent the war years in Brno and began to train as a toolmaker there. After the war he returned to Vranov with his family. From 1947 he worked in ČKD Blansko. In 1950 he enlisted in the army, where he stayed for the next thirteen years as a professional soldier. After leaving for civilian life, he started working at water construction sites and later in Karlovy Vary at Škodovka. In 1973, he was given the position of deputy personnel director at a power company in Brno. He retired in 1989, but worked as a director of a recreation centre and served as mayor of Vranov nad Dyjí from 1998 to 2002.