Václav Brůna: “When the Russians arrived here (the Red Army soldiers in May 1945), we went to them (to the escaped Russian prisoners), but they did not have any documents. A car thus drove them away and I thought that they went to make documents for them. But somebody said that they took them away because they had betrayed the Soviet Union and did not want to fight, and so that they shot them to death. This is what I heard, but I don’t know if it’s true, because if they were alive, they would certainly at least come to have a look, that’s what I thought… Allegedly they were being punished for letting themselves get captured and not fighting. I don’t know if it’s true. Not many people here knew it. That was because they did not go to the village, they did not show up anywhere. Two of them were going to the forests in Peruc, there were some partisans, and the teacher almost always stayed here alone. Sometimes he would go with them, but mostly he stayed here alone, I don’t know if they had a radio transmitter, I did not go to them, I could not speak Russian, I would only place the food for them there and go home.” Interviewer: “And do you remember the arrival of the Red Army?” Václav Brůna. “Yes, I remember it. It was terrible. So many things that they looted. They carried so many things in their vehicles! At that time, wheel rims were still in use, and the horses, they kept running so much. They said that they made them ride all the way to Germany and then back to Russia again and that they endured it all. And they had so much booze, they were drunk and they were shooting here, only in the air, but nobody knew if they were shooting upwards or downwards, there was the cracking of machine guns…” Interviewer: “People here must have been quite afraid…” Václav Brůna: “That’s right, nobody was leaving the house. In 1968 Russians stood on the intersection here, and they had not eaten for about two days. My wife thus sent a bread roll and tea to each of them, and people who saw it came to ask me why I was giving anything to those Russian bitches; one of them is still alive, the others are all dead already… The communists were mistaken, but a year later they began making troubles again, apart from one. And thus I told him: ‘When your boy gets to Russia and stands there hungry… It is not his fault, it’s the high ranks who do it all, but these soldiers here are poor guys, they may get shot for this.’ And nobody could understand it and only later they realized that I was right...”
“When they imprisoned dad, at first they did a house search in our house. They discovered that there was an antenna in the gutter pipe. and so they started looking for a transmitter. But the transmitter was already gone. The priest had had it. I would always take him for the holy mass on my motorbike and then bring him back. And he had taken away the box with the transmitter a month ago. But he left the antenna there. There was a pigeon loft there, and the antenna led all the way to the pigeon loft, and they were searching for it - they used lights, a kind of lanterns - and the antenna led all the way to the pigeon loft and they found out that the antenna led through the gutter pipe. And so in the morning they arrived for me, they picked me up and they interrogated me in Litoměřice. I was interrogated about five times. They changed shifts at twelve o’clock. One came in, beat me over my mouth, and left. Then the others came. They washed me with a sponge. I was not allowed to defend myself, otherwise I would have jumped out and killed him on the spot! They were asking: ‘Who did this to you?’ But they knew it too well, because one time I heard them calling the other one to come in… And one day they brought me in there and I saw that they were carrying another person out of the room and water was dripping from him, he had probably gotten beaten, too, and they wanted me to psychically… But I was tough. The more they went after me, the tougher I was. I still didn’t know what they were after. Eventually: ‘Where is the transmitter?’ - ‘You were searching for it, weren’t you? Did you find any transmitter? And how did you find out where the transmitter was?’ – ‘Well, there is an antenna wire and the antenna leads through the gutter pipe.’ I said: ‘That could be from the war as well! The priest could have it there!’ I misled them so much that they eventually came to believe it and then it was over. But they still could not get it why the wire was still there. Well, nobody was going there, that’s why… The wire was really there all the time since the war? That would be stupid, too. But they let themselves get fooled like this. I thus took a ladder, I climbed up there and really, there it was, five or six metres of rolled copper wire with a kind of reels and I thus took it all down and I thought: ‘So I got all this beating because of that.’”
“There was a haystack which belonged to one farmer, certain Mr. Černý, and he had it here, about two hundred and fifty metres from here when I walked this way behind the house. My father would always get a loaf of bread on Fridays and something to spread on it. Some people, father’s acquaintances, would donate the bread so that nobody else would learn about it, and I would carry it there in the evenings as it was getting dark. The entrance to the haystack was in the direction of Klapý – they had a block of hay pulled out from one side and I would always place the bread and lard there and cover it like this. Dad always told me: ‘If you see some light, dive to the ground immediately and get out of there, because that could mean that somebody is watching you.’ But this never happened. It went on this way until the revolution. For about six months. They were a teacher, a blacksmith and a wheelwright. Three Russians. The teacher was here once, because nobody could speak Russian and they could speak German and my mom could speak German as well, because she was from Něštěmice. He thus told us that when Germany had been bombed, their prison got hit and several of them escaped and they got all the way here to Velkáň.”
“They wanted to establish a Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) in Dlažkovice. My father did not want to get into the JZD, and they imprisoned him for that. Exactly on Christmas Eve, at four o’clock they came for him and imprisoned him. He spent about three days in the prison in Lovosice and then he was investigated in Litoměřice for four months. There were so many of us children and nobody gave any money to our mom. When they took dad away, instead of celebrating Christmas we were all crying for the whole night. In the morning I got on my motorbike and I went to all the prisons, but everywhere they told me that if he had been there he would have been registered. He was in Lovosice and the warden denied it, he claimed that dad was not there but he was there. We only found him when the court trial was held, and we discovered that he was in detention in Litoměřice.”
Václav Brůna was born March 2, 1934 in Lkáň u Klapého in the Litoměřice region as the first of nine children. As a ten-year-old boy he was bringing food to Russian soldiers who were hiding in a haystack behind their house after they had escaped from a bombed out prison in Dresden. Václav’s father Ladislav was arrested for the first time on December 24 1951. He refused to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) in Dlažkovice where he and his wife Marie were working after they had legally handed over their farm in Lkáň to their son Václav who was fourteen years old at that time. However, Václav too had to surrender his farm to the state soon after. In 1954 Václav was drafted to the 67th unit of Auxiliary Technical Battalions. He spent most of his service in quarries as a commander without any military rank because due to political reasons he had not passed the examinations for non-commissioned officers. His farm was confiscated and handed over to the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. After his return from the military service Václav farmed at another farm in Lukohořany which also belonged to his parents. At that time, he and his father were sentenced for posing a risk to the unified economy plan since they were not delivering enough milk, meat and other products to the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. In 1964 Václav and his wife and children settled in their devastated farm in Lkáň. In order to be able to feed his numerous family with seven children, he worked mainly with heavy agricultural and construction machinery and at nights he worked at reconstructing his ruined farm. However, to this day, the restitution process has not been satisfactorily settled due to lack of evidence documents. Václav Brůna was actively involved in the Civic Forum after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and he worked on the lustration processes. He retired when he was seventy-five years old. Václav Brůna died on November 8th, 2022.
