Miloš Šťastný

* 1932

  • "Then Pokorný came and said, 'Šťastný, you're going to quit.' I said, 'How am I going to quit? Where am I going to go again?' And he said, 'Nowhere, I'll give you a paper here, and you decide whether you're going to stay in the army or not.' I said, 'Well, I don't know.' And I had an acquaintance at that time, Martha Herout, who had a farm here [unintelligible]. I said, 'But I'm married,' and he said, 'So what? You take your wife here, she'll live here.' I said, "‘Oh, for sure, she would come here; this place is completely staked out!’ Because the whole villa was staked out. For instance, many times I arrived, and there was a guy standing there. So, I reported it. And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, that’s just a cop spying on you.’"

  • "That Heydrish woman has just taken over everything here. At that time they came here, you can remember that, they were the people who evacuated from the front to here. Here that Heydrishka made big cauldrons in the farmhouse, that's where the soup was cooked, we remember that as boys, that's where the soup was cooked, those national guests, because they didn't have any place to stay, so they slept in the barns and so, and she gave them food. Of course we were there, we were looking, we were chased out right away, understandably. Well, as long as, the two boys were there... it was a beautiful castle in Panenské Břežany. But what happened there was that one of the boys escaped out of the gate and got hit by a car outside, killed him. Now they were worried about what was going to happen, and she was like, he didn't know that the kid ran out, so the driver wasn't to blame. So nothing happened that time, I was surprised."

  • "At that time they were making another kerosene lamp over the kerosene lamp to confuse where to throw the bombs. But it didn't work, then came the raid on Kralupy. Well, and they got the dredgers confused, and instead of throwing it at that, they threw it right at the kerosene lamp. It killed a lot of people there, a lot of people. In that kerosene railroad track, everything was ripped out, it was all gone. What we got as kids was that they carried all the dead people into the church, and they were all lying there, I remember it like it was today, and we walked in a line to watch it. The Germans told us that the Americans had carried out that air raid here, how many people had perished, and all those things.

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Kralupy nad Vltavou, 11.12.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:18:13
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

We had to walk down the block with the school to watch the dead

In the army
In the army
photo: archive of a witness

Miloš Št’astný was born on 4 January 1932 in Prague. He grew up with his grandparents in Úžice, because his parents operated coal warehouses in Kozomin. He moved in with his parents during the first grade. He lived not far from Panenské Břežany, where the Reich Protectors lived during the war. At the end of the war he watched the bombing of nearby Kralupy nad Vltavou. After the air raid, he and his school had to go to the local church where the Germans dumped the dead bodies to show the residents what the Americans had done. After the war he trained as a locksmith and car mechanic and joined ČSAD. During the war he changed several positions, and eventually was transferred to Pilsen, where he was assigned as a personal driver for a Soviet general. After his return, he worked in a veneer factory until his retirement.