First we had to.. after about a week...we had to start driving on the right side. Including trams, everything. Suddenly, there was an order, all changes. But this is just small thing, of course. Immediately everything had to become German. All had to be German and Czech labels. Imagine, for example I went to a football match and they had to, the clubs had to stand up. Had to hail, 11 or 12 of these boys had to stand there and scream "Long live the country". It was directed, it had to be done, or they would end up in concentration camps, or be shot immediately. Because the power was such that a person didn´t know whether one would live tomorrow or not.
It is a fact we believed, I don´t know, we believed in ourselves as a Czech nation. As Czechoslovakians, we believed that this cannot happen, that we are not afraid of anybody, we team up. This was one nation and one mass. People didn´t fight, didn’t scold "you stupid" and so on, it simply didn´t exist. It was one mass. I remember the Prague´s demonstrations, I have experienced them in the 38th, when the square was crowded.. what is its name, in front of the former parliament.. well, it was just crowded by the people. People were rumbling and screaming "give us the weapons, we gave you money for it". The nation wanted to defend themselves, people wanted to shoot.
Everything is here, the Heydrich assassination. I remember it like it was today. Here the cars with convicts were driving by towards the Castle, where they were shooting them. We could hear it. I was about 15, 16, 17, we have heard it, we saw it. I remember my mother who was at home.. those days mothers were at home, they were not so busy.. and she was so shocked hearing it. At the age of 16, 17 we have heard it, I remember it. I can see the car roaming with Gestapo, like it was today.
Today it is being criticized. I strongly disagree that people start thinking we should have fought back then. That we shouldn’t be scared. We were not scared, but the Hitler and the deception from the West which came was terrible, the country fell to its knees. The nation went to its knees, lost all its hope and fast, very fast. And even though it went fast, big part of the nation was against it, was illegally working against the German regime. And today, Benes likes to be criticized upon, that it was wrong and so on. It was not. We loved him. Not saying 100% but 99% of the nation loved him.
These are Benes decrees. All had to be approved by the seated Federal assembly, as a president he signed it. As the whole government. Today they keep saying as if it was his idea, like it was him who got the Germans to move out. It is not truth! The deportation was agreed and approved from the English side. Our people had nothing to say. Even Benes had not much to say in it. These are myths today. It supports these.. that the Germans are not so bad, that we didn´t live a bad life then. It is not truth. These are fairy tales.
František Kraus was born during the First Republic, on October 24, 1927, in Mělník. Mother was a housewife and father worked as a clerk. He himself studied grammar school and later law at the PF UK in Prague. He spent his childhood alternately in Mělník, Vinohrady in Prague and later in Pardubice, where he lived from the beginning of his high school years, when the Second World War started, until today. Not involved in politics, he worked as a corporate lawyer in Průmstav in Pardubice all his life. Work was his hobby and, in his old age, a source of pride for the number of completed buildings throughout the Czech Republic. The monument was a witness to many historical events, the period of the Second World War and the communist period. He strongly disagreed with the relativization of the events surrounding the Munich Agreement and the willingness of the Czechs to fight, as well as with the criticism of Edvard Beneš in the post-war period. He was married twice, has two sons from his first marriage, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. With his second wife Marcela, née Kaufmann, half Jewish, he raised her son. The entire family of his father-in-law Dr. Kaufmann was murdered in concentration camps. František Kraus died on December 12, 2021.
