"He was on his way to work, he worked at Industrial Construction. They [next to Czechoslovak Radio] threw a Molotov cocktail at a tank, which started to burn, the shots started to explode and he got a shrapnel in his stomach. He was left lying there and he bled to death, nobody could get to him, it was exploding there. When he didn't call his family from Prague (I knew his sister and his younger brother Joža well, we used to go to the mountains together), Joža told us what had happened. They phoned and found out that Jaryn had not come to work. His father went to Prague with Joža, who was sixteen or seventeen, to look for Jaryn. They were searching the morgues until they found him, what an experience..."
"In the castle park, above the pond [the Hitler Youth lived in the castle during the war], there was an underground passageway dug through which we used to crawl as children on our way home from school. Who had a flashlight, with a flashlight. I didn´t go in more than four metres, I'm claustrophobic, I was scared to go any further, but the boys crawled far and found a dead German. What had happened to him is a question, but he was dead."
"I remember the shooting at the Napajedla bridge when the Germans were blowing it up. I know that there were sounds of shooting at a wall, the walls were damaged. When we returned to the house, all the windows to the west were broken, the chandeliers, the furniture shot through, with bullets lodged in it. My sister and my neighbour's Líba were crying, they were scared, I was little, I didn't care. Then someone banged on the door, so we all went out, the neighbour was standing there. When we came out, there were wagons with horses coming down the unpaved road. I don't know what was loaded on them, but it was a convoy of wagons, and when we looked up the hill, it's called Maková, it's west from that street, it was full of ants. On the horizon you could see the soldiers, like ants, marching. It's a memory for me, I'm pointing there, but they were marching from south to north, the military formation was spread over the whole area. There was gunfire. I remember being carried in somebody´s arms. They said it was some soldier, 18 years old, blond. I had blond hair. The Romanians were liberating Napajedla, and when they saw me, they pointed at me and said Fritz, so my father immediately packed me off. I had a problem with that more than once, they thought I might be German. I don't know why. I remember when the Russian soldiers brought two buckets of fish from the Morava River. They went and threw grenades in there and fished with the local young men. As it was told they brought a bottle of lard and my mother roasted the fish in the oven for them. They scraped them and cleaned them. On the table, on a plate, they left the bitten off skeletons with heads which they had been eating."
Zdenka Pospíšilová was born on 14 September 1942 in Napajedla as the younger of two daughters of Antonie and Richard Pospíšil. Her uncle Alois Vychodil was imprisoned in Breslau during the World War II. Cousin Alois Vychodil Jr. watched the emergency landing of an American bomber near Napajedla in 1944. The witness lived through the liberation of her native village by Romanian soldiers and the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into our territory on August 21, 1968. Her parents were Catholics, but they joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) after the war and left the church in 1951. After graduating from the eleven-year school in Otrokovice in 1959, Zdenka Pospíšilová began studying pedagogy. Due to health problems she had to leave the school. She started working as a draughtswoman in the Slavia motor Napajedla company. In 1971 she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and started working in the Grand Cinema in Gottwaldov (today’s Zlín) as a manager. She worked there for twenty years, leaving in 1991 after the cinema was taken over by the Bonton Zlín Film Studios. In 2022, at the time of filming, she was living in Napajedla.
