“In the afternoon I returned home by train from Jindřichův Hradec and the Gestapo was in our house. It was in 1945 at the end of the war. They were looking for a radio transmitter or they wanted to know where it was. It was a transmitter for the Voice of America or the London Calling. The transmitter was in the glass factory in a village behind Počátky, because they had a tower. A receiver was installed on that tower. I arrived home from school and the Gestapo men were there. They slapped me on my face several times and asked if I knew where the transmitter was. I replied that I did not even know what it meant. They asked dad and when they found out that he was deaf, they took his younger brother Karel with them. They went to his place, and later we learnt that they arrested him. Afterwards we received a document saying that he was dead and that he had died in a gas chamber in Terezín, although we were not Jews. The vast majority of people in Terezín were Jews, but there were other people, too. People who had been arrested by Germans were interned there.”
“Nobody, nobody wanted to speak about the war. Everybody was saying, God forbid that we live to see it, it is horrible. There is nothing to eat. You don’t know if somebody shoots you or sets your house on fire by a grenade. You don’t know where the war front is going to advance or retreat. The people simply did not want to speak at all about the World War which they themselves had experienced.”
František Lehejček was born October 28, 1927 in Počátky in the Vysočina region. His father was a legionnaire who fought in Russia and who returned to Czechoslovakia in 1922 via the United States of America. During WWII, František’s family was probably involved in hiding a transmitter for communication with London. In 1945 they were interrogated by the Gestapo. Their uncle was arrested and he subsequently died in Terezín. František and other boys from Počátky were regularly bringing food to partisans who were hiding in the surrounding forests. In 1945 he graduated from trade academy and he moved to Prague and worked in the company Výtahy a stroje (Lifts and Machines). František was married and he had two children. He died on March 3, 2016.
