Jan Jančí

“I walked to Javoříčko with my brother. I saw it all. I saw one of the men lying in the ditch. Several others were lying in the ditch near that hamlet. There was Vlček from Vojtěchov, Slavíček from Vojtěchov, a man from Ješov, the woman who went there with the cows, and others, I don’t remember their names. There were about five of them or so. I walked with them all the way to Javoříčko. I accompanied him to Javoříčko and began walking back. Of course I was scared. I saw the dying fire and the women crying. A dead man was lying there, and another one over there. Scared, I returned home and I didn’t have the courage to go there again. Only the following day, on Sunday, we, the guys from here, went to Javoříčko. We summoned some courage. When we came there, people from the neighbouring villages of Březina and Střemeníčko were already there. We discussed what to do next. We had a telephone at home, and so I returned and called the policemen who were on Sunday duty at the station in Litovel. I asked what should be done about the corpses. They gave us some vague answer, which didn’t help us at all, and so we agreed to take the bodies down and bury them ourselves.”

“I told you about Šišma, who was my teacher and with whom we staged the theatre performances. He was also a Sokol member. I think at that time I had been in the prison for two months. One night they opened the door of the cell and threw in a guy with bound hands. I think his wrists were bound at the back, I don’t remember. They put him into the cell at night after the interrogation. His body was bruised all over. He was my former teacher, Šišma, who used to go on trips with us. He had been beaten so badly that I didn’t even recognize him. His skin was all blue and purple. The poor man was in the cell with us and when he wanted to pee, I had to open his fly and help him to... And when he needed to do the other thing, I rang the bell and a warden came for him and led him to the toilet and waited for him there.”

“One of the men who were shot was lying right there behind Veselíčko, some 500 metres from here in the road bend over there. His name was Alfons, and he walked from Luká. When we heard the shots, all of us started running from Veselíčko to Luká. We were scared because some women passed through Veselíčko, and they ran toward us and warned us: ´Go away! They are shooting all the men in Javoříčko.´ One woman went to the forest with her cow-drawn wagon to gather firewood. Her son-in-law got shot there, too. She went there with her cows. I still remember it, because she was the first person who told me about it: ´They are shooting there!´ All of us therefore ran to Luká. They had surrounded Veselíčko from the other side, and from Březina and Střemeníčko. There is one story I want to tell you. At that time I was seeing my wife in the school in Slavětín. Now we were in Luká and we saw the smoke and didn’t know what was happening. Somebody said: ´They are now setting Březina on fire, too.´ Březina is a village behind Javoříčko. I and one or two others were curious. I borrowed a bike from the school in Slavětín, and we went there with these two guys, coming from Ješov to the airfield. Now there is an asphalt road there. At that time it was a dirt road. We were already approaching Střemeníčko. As we were riding the bikes, we approached the road leading from Slavětín to Střemeníčko, and we saw uniformed soldiers. We were still quite far, but when they saw us riding towards them, they began readying their rifles. We jumped down from the bikes and left them there. There was a field, and a hill in the direction of Slavětín and Ješov. For the first time in my life I heard the phew, phew, phew sound: the whiz of the bullets as they were shooting at us.”

“Just imagine the situation: I began farming, and I married – she was the daughter of a school principal, a teacher herself, and she married a farmer. Therefore I had to try hard. I had my own tractor and all the machinery, and the farm prospered. I was meeting the prescribed delivery quotas, which the communist regime required, and they had nothing to catch me on. Later, when they started the campaign of persuading farmers to join the cooperatives, I refused, because I had delivered the required amounts, and they had nothing to blame me for. At that time, I was building a house, and I had to obtain the building material illegally, because it was not like today, when you can buy everything if you have money. The StB men from Litovel and all the people here thought: when Jančí joins, we’ll join too. They still had nothing to catch me on. Then somebody informed upon me that I had bought cement illegally. They began calling on the villagers and gathering evidence against me. They didn’t find anything. I spent five months in detention, two months of this time in solitary confinement. They kept persuading me. I was in court four times. Two times in the people’s court in Litovel, and two times in the regional court in Olomouc. They haven’t proven anything against me. Then they came to see me in the prison: ´Mr. Jančí, let’s be frank. Join the cooperative and we’ll release you.´ They threatened my wife that they would relocate her to the border regions. That’s how they dealt with farmers at that time.”

“There was a partisan named Fiala. He claimed he was a paratrooper. My friends from Hačky brought him to me. At that time I was still single and I had these friends. They introduced him to me, and asked for help if he needed some food or a place to spend the night. He was in my place several times. Then they arrested him and detained him, and he told them everything. Beside me, the other arrested persons were: principal Faltýnek (Josef Faltýnek), he was sentenced to death, Nohavička (Mořic Nohavička), sentenced to death, Vychodil (Josef Vychodil), sentenced to death, Jedlička, sentenced to death. All this happened because this Fiala turned us in and told them that we had supported him. I had nothing at all, I didn’t own any weapons. I only provided support to him.”