I didn’t sleep for several months and kept screaming at night
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František Motyčka was born on 8th May 1924 in Palešnik, Moslavina region, Croatia - back then a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. His ancestors travelled there for freely available land and various other benefits around the year 1900 from Horní Újezd, near Litomyšl. During the Second World War František Motyčka entered a youth organization called SKOJ (Savez komunističke omladine) and cooperated with partisans. In April 1944 he voluntarily joined the Yugoslavian partisan units and fought in several conflicts where many of his friends died. He remembers how they would sometimes find themselves in an open field facing machine guns and that several months later he would still wake up from his sleep tormented by the horrors of war. In 1946 he re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia with his family and settled in Jiřice u Miroslavi where he married Amálie Švejkovská a year later. In 1952 he moved to Lanškroun and worked for Tesla until his retirement. He still lived there as of 2017.
