“Shortly after March 15th 1939 I spoke with my closest friend, Josef Palacký, who would later become the chairman of the town council, national town committee in Valašské Meziříčí. So Josef and me, we made this agreement, that we would go to the barracks and we would try to get in touch with our soldiers who were interned, locked up in the barracks. We were scared a bit by this German soldier who had been already marching in front of the gate armed with a rifle with a bayonet on it. So we rather went away from him, across this meadow by the barracks fence. Nowadays the meadow is gone, there are new buildings there. But back then there was this meadow so we would get to this place where there were those dumps for ashes from stoves, when soldiers would collect ashes, the burned material from the stoves, they would dump it there. And Josef Palacký and me, we were sitting by the fence and we waited till some of our soldiers would show up. And we had been waiting for quite a long time. In about half an hour, a soldier appeared carrying metal... This metal bucket from which smoke from the burning ashes was still rising. And he went, he stood on his toes and he dumped the ashes into that concrete storage or concrete dump. And we greeted him. And we told him: 'Please, could you hand us some rifle over the fence? Or at least a bayonet?' And he said: 'Boys! Get lost at once! If the Germans would see you here, you would have such a hard time!” So after that... He would turn and go back to the barracks. And we marched home in grief. I guess that was some kind of divine intervention. As if we would show up in the street with a rifle or some weapons in general, we would attract unwanted attention and we would get into some serious trouble. But the fact was that we had been eleven years old back then and we were immersed in every possible act of resistance against the invaders and we wanted to solve everything in a way that was quite unwise.”
“For example the liberation of May 6th 1945 was... Well, many tragedies occurred at that time. For example, my father and me, we went to see how it looked like in the shop and we just unveiled some curtain and we saw this young Soviet soldier with a machine-gun standing in front of our shop who just fell down suddenly and showed no signs of life. Later we found out that on the opposing side – the square was maybe eighty meters wide – there was a sniper hidden in an attic who would just select the man and put him down. So that was quite a sad thing to see. This young man lost his life during the last day of the war, or last but one to be precise. And there had been more stories like this.
“And most of all after the Heydrich assassination. The situation escalated so much that we witnessed several raids by the German authorities. They were plainclothes but they searched our schoolbags and so on. That was quite unexpected, I would say, as we had never experienced anything like this. And at that time, it just happened. And there was this one more event after that, also quite an interesting one, as we had been summoned to an office at school where those two men in lab-coats measured our cranium. They had this movable ruler of sorts. And they would record the data. They were particularly interested whether we had blond hair, if we had blue eyes, well, whether we could have been classified as Aryans. I remember one girl from our class passing those tests. The rest of us ended up, I would say, as the unpopular Slavs.”
“There was this very sad moment, sad indeed, as after the annexation of Sudetenland, after Munich and the annexation of Sudetenland, I saw this woman in Valašské Meziříčí, a mother who carried one baby in her arms and the other one on her back in this backpack. She wept as she went, as she had to flee the borderlands, maybe she was from Nový Jičín or someplace nearby, as even Nový Jičín had been annexed. And the lady just got to our territory but she had no money, nothing, just those two little babies. So those were moments I found extremely difficult. And it wasn't just me after all.”
“After that, there was this complicated situation, I would say, to quote a classic: 'What to do with it?' What to do with Marxism-Leninism teachers? It was a bloated department, whole institute at the university. What to do with those people? And they demanded their salaries of course, as they were still employed by that department of theirs. And no one needed them. So it was quite a complicated situation, and of course rector had to deal with that later, the ministry and so on, as a whole new nationwide policy was needed for those people who were in fact no longer of any use.”
Milan Kejzlar was born on February 25th 1928 in Olomouc. His father, Ladislav, ran a shop in Valašské Meziříčí till 1948 – Dům módy (Fashion house). As an eleven-year-old he tried to get weapons with his friend from some interned Czech soldiers, but the men talked them out of such naive and dangerous act. While at the secondary school, he witnessed Gestapo raids after the killing of Reinhard Heydrich and had his cranium measured with his schoolmates. As an ardent amateur radio operator he built a one tube radio so his whole family could listen to foreign radio stations illegally. At the end of the war, he witnessed the murder of Antonín Home, a resistance fighter, who tried to escape from the Gestapo station in Valašské Meziříčí. He graduated from The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Brno University of Technology and has a patent for a microwave power meter. After finishing his studies, he had been employed in Tesla Pardubice, working on a secret radar project; after that, he had been transferred to Tesla Orava in Slovakia and had been a part of a team trying to develop a television with the lowest failure rate and also the famous RPP-16 computer. After that he had been working at the University of Transportation in Žilina and even before the revolution he had been trying to reinstate teachers who were forced to focus solely on research after the ‘normalization’ screenings.
