"Around one o'clock the shelling of our village began from the Slovak side and it fell first around the village. But they had good sights, so then it was really coming in. And one of the shells hit our neighbour's and our building."
"Our head monk stood in the doorway, 'Boys, get up now,' and went into the next room. We got up immediately, and when we looked in the door again, there was a soldier standing there with a machine gun pointing it at us. One of us couldn't wake up. SNB officer flew in with a machine gun and simply pulled him out of bed. We were ordered to take a toothbrush, get dressed and go out into the corridor."
"They loaded the blankets into the car, put the wounded in the blankets and drove through the front to Velká nad Veličkou. Of course, they were stopped by German soldiers, but a neighbour spoke German and explained to them what and how and he let them go. So they got happily four kilometres across the front to Velka, but they couldn't find a doctor because they were all hidden away. Then someone told them where he was. He didn't have the courage to come out, so they took the wounded to the cellar where he treated them. And again they had to take them back through the front."
František Kostelanský was born on 25 April 1931 on a farm in Kuželov. His childhood was marked by the war, during which he lost his father and grandmother, his mother was severely wounded during the shelling of the village. After the war, he decided to study at the church gymnasium in Kroměříž, and after the closing of the gymnasium in 1948, he continued his studies secretly, in the monastery in Hájek near Prague. On 14 April 1950 he and all his classmates became victims of the K action and were taken to an internment camp. In the following two years, they tried to re-educate him in Bohosudov, in Hájek and during the construction of the Klíčava dam near Zbečno. Even at the time just before his release home, he was still considered stubborn and unruly. In 1952 he joined the military service of the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP) and during his service in Slovakia he was the victim of an accident in which he severely injured both his legs. Despite the initial ban on further studies, he managed to graduate from the University of Agriculture in Brno and worked there for many years as a teacher.
