Jan Francl

“My father worked at the machine station in Mikulov. There he got sawdust and wood shavings. We would store it in the neighboring house. We heated in the sawdust boiler and had to bring the sawdust to the boiler. As it was an old building, the roof was like this and the sparrows slept up there. We looked for them and lit it up with a flash light. Somebody saw it and because there was no way he could have said that we were signaling to Austria as from that side it could not have been seen, they claimed that we were sending out signals outside of the border zone in the direction of Drnholec for the saboteurs to be able to return from the border zone to Austria.”

“Well and this is how it started with the signaling. Because Vily, as a musician, played the trumpet with the firefighters. When there was a fire, he played the trumped to signal fire. There used to be a pub where the community center stands nowadays. He stopped at the pub to have a beer and that’s when he heard somebody signaling the fire alarm on the trumpet. He previously already had to hand in his own trumpet because the Bulgarians were supposed to manage it themselves but now he heard that fire alarm. He was fully consumed by that trumpet signaling so he went home and took the keys to the church tower. On his way to the church, he met Ondra Mikoláš, a Bulgarian. He asked him if he hadn’t heard the fire alarm. Ondra said he didn’t. So Vily ran up the tower to get a view of the village. Meanwhile, Ondra waited for him downstairs, looking after his bike. Vily didn’t see anything so he came down again. But before he could even walk down the tower, there were police men waiting for him. They took him to Drnholec to the police station. Because of course, he had taken his flash light with him to the tower and somebody saw it and reported it to the police. They even did a police reconstruction of it and found out that the beam of the flash light was barely visible from the pub. So they then let him go. But at first they took him to the police station in Drnholec, where they interrogated him. They thought that he was trying to signal to somebody in Austria, to make it possible for saboteurs to come to Czechoslovakia.”