"For example, we were going to villages with Skrášek to convince. Back then, when a student applied to university, the municipality wrote: 'Yes, we can accept it,' or: 'No, we don't agree.' We visited some villages, we were in Velehrad, Babice, Huštěnovice, and we convinced the local officials that they should let the students go. For example, there was a doctor in Babice and his daughter, an excellent student, wanted to study medicine. And they said no, that it is enough that her father is a doctor, that they will let her go to an agricultural university. Such various things. So, we went there and finally in this case we managed to convince them that it was stupid if the girl wanted to study medicine, so they let her go. We didn't succeed at Velehrad, for example. It's hard for me to say names. I talked it through with students and parents. They didn't want to let go one boy, of whom I was a class teacher. Excellent student, excellent. There are few of them. And in addition to studying, he was a musician and they didn't want to let him go to university. His father, as a teacher in Velehrad, did not leave the church. And his colleague, who was also religious, left the church and in the meantime became a district school inspector. Olin and I even convinced our director, a communist, who had connections all the way up to Alois Indra and I don't know who. We went to Velehrad and for over three hours were convincing the local officials that they had to let the boy go, that there are few such people in the republic. They finally agreed to it. Only one of them ran off, saying that he was going downstairs for advice. He consulted it with the former colleague who became an inspector. He was sitting down there and said, 'No, you can't.' So, they didn't allow the boy go."
"They offered me several times to join the party. I always refused. And unfortunately I joined the party only after I was transferred from Kroměříž to Staré Město to an eleven-year school. There, the young comrade director Kaňovský organized us all in such a way. It was approaching the sixty-eighth year. I was there very briefly, when the Prague spring was already starting. We just thought that reasonable people would shape it somehow, which was a mistake at the time." - "You remained a member of the Communist Party." - "No, then they fired me because I wasn't agile in any way."
"When we first went to see how our scout hut looks like near Břestek, we found an artillery mine on the way not far from the hut. This is an example of how stupid young people can be. When we saw the mine, our first thought was that we could defuse it. We threw stones from a respectful distance so that if we hit it, it would explode. Stupid idea. We couldn't hit it, so we gradually got closer. Always behind a tree, we threw, hid, it didn't explode. When we managed to poke the mine and it didn't explode, we couldn't think of anything other and Džin took the mine, looked at it, held it like this in his hand and said what we were going to do with it. So we went to a pub full of people in Břestek, found a mine and put it on the counter. The place was empty within the moment. People escaped through doors and windows. You know, we were stupid about some things.'
"Once, already in April 1945, when the army was already moving through Kunovická, when I was there, I don't know what I was playing. Suddenly, a convoy of cars was coming along Kunovická, and suddenly planes flew in, opened fire, and we heard machine gun bullets bouncing off the road. We were trapped and screwed with fear. My friend died when the sugar factory was bombed, and then a number of my friends - I don't know, six, eight, Láďa Žalud, Filipský. When the Germans blew up the Moravian bridge on the night of April 30th to May 1st, they ran to look there and the Germans had prepared landmines there and several people lost their legs there. Or in the Kunovice forest, some friends lost their legs this way.'
František Petlan was born on February 14, 1927 in Uherské Hradiště as the middle of three children to parents Hedvika and František. His father fought in the Austrian-Hungarian army during the First World War and after returning home he fought in the Czechoslovak army against Hungary. During World War II, the witness studied at the secondary grammar school and business academy in Uherské Hradiště. However, both of these schools were closed by the Nazi administration, so he did not finish school until 1946. He then studied teaching with a focus on mathematics and art education at the Palacký University in Olomouc. He then taught all his life. First at the pedagogical school in Kroměříž and then at the eleven-year school in Staré Město, which in 1966 was merged with the secondary grammar school in Uherské Hradiště, where from 1970 he held the position of deputy director of the school. Shortly before the Prague Spring, he joined the Communist Party, where he remained until 1988. František Petlan is, above all, the most prominent personality of post-war scouting in Uherské Hradiště. He first joined the Scouts in 1938 and experienced all its bans under both Nazism and Communism. He also took part in the renewal of the organization in 1945, 1968 and 1989. He led the Hradiště center, was a district leader, and chairman of the district council. In 2002, he received the medal of the Zlín region (gold level) for the development of scouting in Zlín. In 2004, he was awarded the City of Uherské Hradiště Prize. At the time of the recording of the interview in 2018, he was 91 years old and led a troop of old scouts.
