“My father celebrated his birthday on September 20, 1941. This was at a time when the German persecution was incredibly fierce. 15 members of the regional leadership of the Sokol came from Ostrava by relay to celebrate my father’s birthday. I brought the last relay. The whole room was crowded with Sokols and I read out aloud: ‘brother, regional chieftain. Today, on the day of your birthday, we’ve come from far and near to greet you in your native cottage, where the Sokol flame is burning to light the torch of our country when the right moment comes’. Not even a month later, on October 8, my father was arrested by the Gestapo. They came to our house at half past one in the night and banged on the window. They directed the flash lights at the windows. ,Machen Sie auf!' They surrounded the cottage and took my father to jail. He was lucky not to be taken to Auschwitz, like everybody else. My mother’s brother, Vojtěch Mácha, died in Auschwitz. He was a former Russian legionary. My dad was lucky. He was a craftsman and they had a workshop in Brno-Veveří, where they kept him in prison. So he came back home.”
“First we had to go to see the doctor for a medical check-up. Then we were sent a labourer’s index. The index said we’d go to work in Berndorf, but it changed again in Vienna, this time to Theresienfeld. But at that point, it didn’t occur to us that the Germans would be so hideous. They sent us to Vienna in a cattle car! No seating, all there was were four buckets. This is how we travelled to Vienna. In Vienna, we boarded a regular train to Neustadt. They wanted to humiliate us, to show us that we were petty and that there was no way to complain. They wanted to demonstrate to us that they could do whatever they liked.”
“They would meet in the bakery and the bakery also baked bread for them. We would load a car full of bread for them. Once, we encountered the Gestapo right outside of Dolní Bečva, on the frontier with Prostřední Bečva. They were on two tri-cycles and a number of motorbikes. They checked the car searching for any bread exceeding the plan. But we weren’t stupid. We gathered everything at Oldřich Šimerda. He was later also hanged without a sentence.”
“When we were passing the main stage, where all the functionaries and the president were seated, we would start to sing: ‘Valaši se ptajú, kde Beneše majú, v Praze se nám líbí, Beneš nám tu chybí. Chcem Beneše na Hradě, a ne v ohradě, nedáme si diktovat, koho máme milovat’ (singing in support of former president Beneš). This was spreading like wild fire, jumping from one man to another. The police directorate issued an order to find the perpetrator and to punish him. So we relieved them of their activity. Then it faded out. They left us alone.”
Radko Linhart was born on August 16, 1921, in Krmelín in the region of Frýdecko-Místecko. As he himself liked to emphasize, he was baptized under the open sky at the football field of the local Sokol. All family members were Sokol members. His father Karel Linhart was the chieftain and since 1939, he was even the head of the Sokol regional organization of the Moravskoslezský region, counting in excess of 30000 members. Being a high-ranking Sokol functionary, Karel Linhart spent a large portion of the war in the internment camp Pod kaštany in Brno. In November 1942, Radko Linhart was assigned to forced labour in Austrian Theresienfeld, from where he fled in June 1944. Thereafter, he became involved in resistance activities and supported the partisans in Dolní Bečva. He helped his brother in law, Hynek Tošenovský, with the supply of bakery products. However, Hynek Tošenovský was arrested in the course of the operation Tetřev that was aimed against the partisans and publicly executed on November 23, 1944 in Dolní Bečva not far away from his own house. Radko Linhart then took over his bakery and continued to supply the partisans with bread. In 1951, the bakery was nationalized. Radko would continue to be in charge of it for another ten years, before it was shut down and he would find employment with the Hutisk bakery. Here he stayed until his retirement. Radko Linhart was keenly interested in sport throughout his life and was an active sportsman. As a referee, he took part in 11 Olympics and 16 world or Europe championships. He died on February 10, 2015.
