"My father had a friend, a good man with whom he was in captivity (witness' father was a Czechoslovak legion member). The Bodlák family... they were first on the list when the communists started arresting people. The reason was that their first son served in the Royal Air Force, the second one was imprisoned in the Kounic Residence Hall by the Nazis, and Mrs Bodláková and her daughter were interned in Svatobořice. As all the wives were there, whose husbands were executed and so. So they were first on the list. The Bodlák family was the most persecuted in the whole Líšeň.”
"He worked for the Langer family, in their factory. They made these spiral borers and what they did was right indeed. As they would employ people who were facing danger, yet they managed to avoid suspicion. So the people were totally deployed at their company. So they didn't have to go to Kuřim or some place else. They could stay where they lived. So they supported the people of Líšeň quite a lot.”
"This was quite unpleasant. As we were living in Klajdovská Street in Brno-Líšeň, and across the street there was the Workers House where this German school was located. That was quite ugly as they would open the windows and sing Die Fahne Hoch (the NSDAP anthem during the Third Reich). So we just thought that there was no need for us to hear that. But there were just a few of them. They were poor so they could be tempted quite easily. As they were collaborators, our people, who joined Germans for profit. As there were several people like this.”
Květuše Kučerová, née Sedláčková was born on January 10th, 1928 in Brno as a daughter of Jan Sedláček, a former Czechoslovak legion member. Both she and her two sisters were raised in the spirit of the Sokol movement and the ideas of Masaryk. She was also raised as a Christian. Later she married František Kučera, an ardent communist. He witnessed the execution of his father in 1941 – an anti-Nazi resistance fighter – at Kounic Residence Hall in Brno. Their marriage was tainted by politics, as their families were not able to get along. Due to his involvement in the 1970s ideological screenings, Květuše’s husband sought psychiatric care, yet till the end of his life he remained faithful to his communist ideals and rejected the Velvet Revolution as a nation’s tragedy. The witness died in September 2020 in Brno.
Local authority officials during the First Republic; witness' husband's father, František Kučera (second row on the right) was executed in 1941 in Kounic Residence Hall for his participation in anti-Nazi resistance
Local authority officials during the First Republic; witness' husband's father, František Kučera (second row on the right) was executed in 1941 in Kounic Residence Hall for his participation in anti-Nazi resistance
