“Even a year after I could smell the stench of burning, of something charred. But it was not from the event, it was because it had been so engraved in my mind. I still smelt the charred human flesh. It was terrible. You will be interested to know what happened with the traitors. Baťa was executed, and I was present at the execution, because they brought all of us from Ploština there. Had it happened today, or had I been older, I would not have gone. But my daddy went there, and so I went with him. But as long as I am alive, even if my own son were to be hanged, I would never want to witness an execution again. On that day, two men were to be hanged, and one of them was already fainting when they were leading them to the gallows. But Baťa walked proudly. The German - he was a Sudeten German - and his mother was present at the execution; his last wish was to say good-bye to his mother. But this Baťa had one last wish and that was to smoke a cigarette.”
“Partisans came to us. They were all Russians. My father had been a captive in Russia, so he was able to speak to them. There were seven men and two women. But later, there were thirty of them, and you could not feed all of them from the fields here. So we would be going from Ryliska to Vysoké Pole and from Ploština to Drnovice – to houses where we knew they would give them something and would not turn them in. And people were generous, because they were really already fed up with the war. They were giving meat, bread, whatever they could. Flour, sugar…”
“And they were taking people from the fields, even those, who knew nothing about the partisans. And they brought them here to Ploština and Machů determined which of them had been helping the partisans or hiding them. He was pointing also to the people who have been dragged here from the village. They have never seen a single partisan. And here, this piece of chain, it is an original, is the chain by which six men were bound and burnt alive. My brother was among them. Here, you can see how the burnt people looked like, you could not even tell they were humans, there were only charred remains. And the second group, they were forced to jump through an open window into a burning house. This Machů, father of eight children, had to jump as the first one.”
“It happened on April 5th, when Nikolaj shot himself, when he died. And we already knew that the war was coming to an end. And the partisans were streaming in from all over. Two Gestapo informers came here, and they had a fight with each other, about which of them would get to join the partisans. So they beat each other and they came covered in blood and bruises. And the partisans believed them, they made up a story that they were on the run from the Gestapo. And after two weeks in Ploština, when they have found out how many partisans there were, about the weapons, etc., they ran away. They got a guard with them and they rushed to Vizovice - there was the office of the Gestapo in the chateau in Vizovice - and there they told them everything. That was on April 17th.”
“I would like to ask one extra question: what did the revolution in November 1989 mean to you personally?” – “It was good, we were happy. But now I am just curious which party will win...” – “And you received your first compensation only after 1989?” – “Yes.” – “And before, there was nothing?” – “Before that we were only receiving free transport passes and we did not have to pay for the telephone. I mean we paid for the calls, but we were exempt from the phone rental fee. I was sorry about it, that they let us go in this way.”
“In the morning on 19th April, an intermediary came, informing us that a great number of soldiers was on their way to Ploština. Together with the Gestapo from Zlín, Vizovice and Slušovice. The night before, we had slaughtered a cow, and so the men quickly began cleaning it up after the partisans. We did not know this was a trap, we thought that if they came and did not find anything nor the partisans, that they would leave. This had happened before, that the Germans came to investigate something, and when they did not find anything, they just left. But this time we were betrayed and they came with certainty. And they already knew precisely who was hiding the partisans. So we quickly put the meat into bags, one group of men was digging a hole for it, the other group was bringing dung to cover it, so that it would not look as a recently covered hole. And I suddenly remembered that there was a pile of freshly washed shirts and underwear in the loft. I ran in haste to the loft and I was throwing the things down to one of the partisans.”
Božena Húšťová, a witness of the Nazi carnage in several pastoral villages in the area of Vizovice at the end of WWII, was born on April 1st, 1929 in the hamlet of Ryliska, located near the Ploština settlement. People in these remote settlements were helping the partisans, who were on the move from Slovakia to the mountains on the Moravian-Slovak border in November 1944. In the Vizovice highlands and in the Beskydy Mountains, at the turn of 1944 and 1945, the 1st Czechoslovak partisan brigade of Jan Žižka began its operations. The brigade was commanded by Major Dajan Bajanovič Murzin. Inhabitants of these scattered villages were supplying the partisans with food and shelter, and many even joined them in their anti-Nazi activity. František Raška, Božena Húšťová’s father, was one of these selfless supporters of the partisans; their cottage became the unofficial headquarters of the Ploština unit and the partisans themselves assigned him to the rank of Major. In spring 1945, during the last months of the war, two Gestapo members infiltrated the partisan group, and they turned in the partisans and the citizens of Ploština and other pastoral hamlets to the Gestapo office in Zlín. On April 19th,1945, Ploština was set on fire by the members of the counter-partisan unit “Josef” and by the SS soldiers. 24 people, who were mainly from the hamlets of Vysoké Pole and Drnovice, perished in the attack on Ploština. That day, Božena Húšťová lost her brother, who was burned with other victims in a barn. Fortunately her father and her elder sister were out of the village at the time. The Nazis burnt down other villages as well, and many civilians lost their lives. After the war, a monument was erected in Ploština along with a museum of anti-Nazi resistance, where Božena Húšťová now works as a guide. She tells the museum’s visitors about the dramatic fate of Ploština during the war, but also of its fate in the post-war period, when the settlement was rebuilt and the survivors had to cope with the loss of their loved ones, and with the fact that most of the perpetrators of the Ploština tragedy were never caught.
