František Krajíček

* 1929  †︎ 2019

  • „Then I was in Pardubice. One platoon was not far from us. In the platoon there were all fifty sixty years old people, the ones in command were corporals. In one platoon there was a young corporal, a boy of twenty years, who was treating the old people very roughly. Even the soldiers learnt that there is his father in the platoon he leads. And it was a horror the way he commanded it and his father too. The boys knew what to do. They waited for him, threw a blanket over him, beat him and it was all over.“

  • „I became an Adventist when I was seventeen... then I got baptised. I was in Otrokovice the only person, who asked for the free Saturday. I had troubles but it was all right. After the third recruitment in 1950 I was taken... in 1951, on 15 April I joined the technical services as a soldier as one of the PTP.“

  • „I wanted to claim a free Saturday in the army too as it was a part of my belief. Of course I got into troubles and spent two months in a trial detention in Pilsen - Bory. The custody was not so bad, I was working and waited for the trial sentence. Two months later a new commander called me in and said: ‚You know what. I will not send you back and you do one thing for me. You get lost every Saturday. I don´t care where you are but you won´t be here.‘ And so it happened.“

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    Otrokovice, 29.08.2015

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    duration: 42:47
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Who rules with his mind is better than the one conquering a whole city

Contemporary picture
Contemporary picture

František Krajíček was born on 20 January 1929 in Holešov. He apprenticed in Otrokovice Bata school as a work spinner and then worked as a manual labourer. He joined the Seventh-day Adventists church at the age of seventeen. In 1951 he was recruited to army and joined the PTP. Even here he stuck to the rules according to his faith; due to that fact he was persecuted. For several months he was imprisoned in Pilsen, Bory. Later he got a new leader, who tried to meet his needs and did not force him to work on Saturday. In 1954 František Krajíček returned to Otrokovice and joined Svit as a worker. In 1969 he became the preacher of the Seventh-day Adventists and worked in Jihlava, Šumperk, Holešov and Uherské Hradište. In 1989 he retired, lived in Otrokovice and still helped in the church. František Krajíček died in 2019.