"They didn't say that he was sacked, they used the term 'dismissed by the action committee' instead. He found some civilian job and wanted to take revenge on them. There was this giant hay stack in Šlapanice. It must have been dozens of railway cars full of hay. He proposed to set it on fire. He borrowed a car from his friend and we drove there. He was very cautious and so he gave me the gas canister to pour it on the hay. I walked around the hay stack and poured the gasoline on it, then I stroke a match and it burnt. They didn't do anything. It burnt for three weeks. It had to burn down, nobody could extinguish it. The boys were enthused by it. They said we should do something like that in Křenovice as well. The plan was to set the barn on fire. So we prepared it. We first went to a New Year's celebration party and then we went to burn down the barn. Mr. Mrázek wanted to do something. His uncle was a pilot. So we set it on fire and we ran away. We went back to that ball room. After a while, somebody came and shouted: 'the farms collective is on fire. Everybody who's interested come and help putting it out."
"They sent a politruk who told me: 'Something happened to your parents, you're supposed to come home'. We had an agreement with Klobas (Oldřich Klobas), that should something happen, the code sentence would be that something happened at home and I should come home. Well, even though just half of the sentence was right, you can't expect that uninvolved people will give you the exact word order. He told me that they had a car there and could take me home if I wanted. I wanted to take the train but he insisted that they would take me home by car, that it was no problem at all for them. So I got into the car and they introduced themselves to me: 'we're from the state security'. And that was it."
"At first they tried it in a polite way but then: 'will you talk you bitch?!' They smacked me on the face a couple of times and then they brought two truncheons. One of them was a state-security truncheon and the other one was an authentic Gestapo truncheon. The German one was about this long. It was basically a steel rod covered with rubber. The Czech one was a piece of a hosepipe filled with lead or something of the sort. They could break your bones easily with the Czech truncheon. There was nothing you could do. They always outnumbered you. I was helpless against them. I was slim, 20-year-old boy who weighted only about 50 kilos. We weren't beaten so badly, but they banged our heads against the wall. I still have problems today. Sometimes, when I stand at an intersection and the traffic light is on red, I see green instead or vice versa."
Mojmír Babušík was born in 1933 in Křenovice. Although he comes from a poverty-stricken background, he took a stand against the Communist regime after it had come to power. Together with the members of the Junák (the Czech equivalent of the Scout – note by the translator) in Křenovice, he founded the SODAN resistance group (the acronym for the “Scout Organization of Democracy and Independence”) and became its leader and main organizer. The organization fought against oppression and injustice in different ways. They produced and distributed threatening letters to party officials, printed anti-regime leaflets and when this didn’t have any effect, they burned down hay stacks and barns belonging to the farms collectives. After several arson attacks they were caught because they were given away by informers. Mojmír Babušík was subjected to a series of brutal interrogations in the State security prison in Brno in Příčná Street. Despite of the threat of being sentenced to death by the Regional Court in Brno, Mojmír Babušík acted very bravely and openly criticized the communist regime in court. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, of which he served ten years and nine months in the prison camp Equality and Leopoldov. He died in April 2016.
