Alois Navrátil

* 1935

  • "It's like an interesting fact that the prisoners had targets painted on their backs so that if they tried to escape... But I don't know of anyone escaping from here. It was so secured - there were these roadblocks, there were various explosives planted there, and then there was a corridor, about three meters high, absolutely no one could climb over it. They would say, but it's probably nonsense, that one [prisoner] escaped. He ran out of the cell, had two boards, put one on the fence, the other on top and jumped over. But that's just an old wive's story."

  • "That was one of the places we guarded [Barbora–Vršek labour camp], and then we used to go down to somewhat of a gully - I don't know what the camp was called. It was terrible, unimaginable, what kind of horror was there. When you looked from Vršek, on the opposite of you was Mariánská, a church. The prisoners went to work at the uranium mine through a corridor, around 150 convicts. When they came out of the mine, out of the heat, they came to the camp, put them at attention and counted them to see if anyone was missing. They stood for an hour, an hour and a half, in the cold, and they only wore a thin blouse, every day."

  • "I joined in the evening, and on Christmas Day, I was already watching the convicts all night. I felt terrible, Christmas Day... There was that camp [Barbora–Vršek], I don't know how many convicts there were, about 800, it was near Klínovec, about 1000 meters high, there was a lot of snow, it was foggy. The service on the tower lasted two hours, then we went behind the fence between the towers and rested for two hours. And before the guards officer took us there, we didn't sleep at all. Moreover, we had to sleep in our shoes, so it was absolutely horrible, unimaginable."

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    Zlín, 30.06.2022

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I started to hate communists in the military service

Alois Navrátil
Alois Navrátil
photo: Witness archive

Alois Navrátil was born on December 19, 1935, in Vsetín - Dolní Jasénka as the only child of parents Alois Navrátil, an upholsterer, and mother Marie Navrátilová, née Zgabajová, who was a housewife and later worked as a cleaner in a kindergarten. The family was religious and lived very modestly. As a child, he experienced World War II and the subsequent liberation. After the war, Alois started going to the local Sokol. He also participated in the XI. the all-Sokol gathering in Prague in 1948. In the 1950s, the father’s business was nationalized. Alois Navrátil trained as a metal grinder in Zbrojovka (arms factory) Vsetín, where he worked until his retirement after returning from the military service. He completed basic military training in Rotava, and then in 1955, he was transferred to the Barbora-Vršek camp near Jáchymov, where he guarded the watchtowers. He spent half a year here - this period was one of the worst in his life. He never joined the Communist Party. He got married in 1962. He and his wife Jana, née Brettschneiderová, have two sons. In the seventies, he became a member of the Mountain Rescue. In 1989, he supported a student demonstration in Vsetín with other workers from Zbrojovka. In 2022, he lived in Vsetín.