František Němec

* 1932

  • "And I'll tell you one more thing like that, a nurse came to our room in the morning and made the beds, and I tell her, 'Nurse, there's an empty bed again.' And she tells me, 'Every day one of you dies. 'Imagine it was so dangerous and complicated. And I was there for a month, in that hospital suffering from the typhus. Then I was released, and when I got home, my mother welcomed me and said, 'I prayed for you to God.' Believe it or not, I'm alive."

  • "Always, when I was home after school on Thursday, I was sitting by the window and at ten o'clock, for example, a carriage with a pair of horses was ridding and pulling a four-wheeled wagon. And at ten o'clock in the morning they carried one large coffin in this carriage, it was called an Austrian, and four small coffins were placed next to it and they took them to Chernivtsi to bury them in the cemetery. And since the cemetery was already full and the Roma had nowhere to be put, the small cemetery next to Žalov opened and it was ok there. Pits were dug there and they were putting them in paper bags, not even in coffins, and dumped them into the pits and covered them."

  • "The head of the plant called us to the office and told us that the Soviet troops and the Warsaw Pact occupied Brno and gave us, as factory firefighters, the task of hanging a black flag on the Kras, on the building of our factory. We had to obey him and we climbed to the roof and hung the black flag there. We were all four masters at it. And the old communist bastards photographed us, and we immediately got fired from the party because of it. Some were expelled, I was crossed out and it ended there. So, I was grilled as they say and they left me be on the then job position. But the others were saying that I was crossed out ... and my other friends who were working on these positions, they all got fired and worked manually."

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    Hodonín u Kunštátu, 08.11.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 03:46:36
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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They were coming this road, helped building it, and also left to Auschwitz through this road

František Němec in 2021
František Němec in 2021
photo: Post Bellum

František Němec was born in Hodonín near Kunštát on January 24, 1932. He grew up on the family farm of Alois Němec, a trained carpenter, and Anna, née Dvořáková. As a child, the witness witnessed events connected primarily with the existence of the so-called Gypsy camp near Hodonín near Kunštát in a place called Žalov, where the Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Moravia stands today. He recalls the admission procedure that the Roma underwent after arriving at the camp gate, the carriages that carried the dead to Chernivtsi, and he walked with other children to the immediate vicinity of the camp. On January 18, 1945, František Němec became a witness to the Gestapo’s investigation of the inhabitants of Hodonín near Kunštát after the killing of the German gendarme Bruno Scholz by partisans from the Third Czechoslovak army strike company in Hodonín’s pub of the stepfather of Drahomíra Kahulová (1926). In 1946, at a time when Germans destined for deportation were interned in the area of the former so-called Gypsy camp, he and several other Hodonín children became infected with typhus and had to be hospitalized in Brno. After the war, he trained as a tailor. At the time of collectivization, the family was affected by the persecution of farmers. After the training to be a tailor and evening master school in Prostějov, the witness became a master and spent most of his life working in various operations of the Kras company (Brno, Měřín, Boskovice). He gradually rose through the shift manager and technologist to the post of director, even though he was fired from the Communist Party after 1968. After 1989, he worked for 14 years as a representative of Hodonín near Kunštát and held the position of mayor for two voting terms (1998–2006). He lived in Hodonín near Kunštát in 2022.