„Back then, the police had this right to control everything before the construction started. So they were checking it here and I had to bring them a book, a textbook from Austria, to show them how it could be built, and they liked it, and in this place, it was suitable to build one, and that’s why it was Gočár’s ring road, as thanks [sic! Unclear. Josef Gočár was an architect who created the master plan for several of Hradec Králové’s neighbourhoods and designed several notable buildings, the ring road is named after him, not the roundabout.] At the beginning, there were troubles, when the country folk drove to the town, they did not know that they were supposed to go around. For All Saints’ Day, there were police exttras to organise the traffic so that people wouldn’t crash into each another. This was a system that had already worked in the West, mainly in Germany, and we just copied it from them. It can be called carousel as well, and now I am not sure whether it’s a German word. Or, it’s rather an international term, now it’s carousel all over the place, so, in Czech, it would be a circular road crossing.”
"When they were approaching, there were two such WWII tanks, so we pushed them there where there was an underpass, as scarecrows, they were not working. And then we waited to see what would happen. When the Russians arrived and saw the tank, they stopped, reversed and sent some soldiers to find out what's up and those found out that the tanks were just empty shells. So they dragged it away for recycling and went on."
„We were worried, Bukovina was the next village, they wouldn’t go there but they often drove across Studenec. We did not go there, we were afraid of them, there were soldiers driving there and back and taking over. Because, for example, this thing had happened, we gathered in front of the school and one of our schoolmates, he was from Bukovina, he said: ‘I see that the Germans are coming, I’ll run away up to the Horka hill.’ And that was a fatal mistake because when the Germans saw someone running across the field, they shot him. When it ended, we had to take his body to Studenec and then it was taken to Bukovina. The funeral was arranged in Bukovina but we were afraid to go there because the Henlein supporters started to write down who lives where and where they go.”
„When there was a ball in our village, then the Ordners came then, with those white knee socks of theirs and started to mess with everything and they wanted the band to play German songs, not the Czech ones. So they fought among themselves, I was just a small boy, we would run away from there. And those picket fences that were there, they would break the poles off and with those, they would beat each other. Or they did this thing, they would stain their white sock with black shoe polish so that they would look really messy. And that was how it went. But each of them were encouraged from their side to go against the others. But the Czech side was the weaker one whereas the [German one]… had that big country behind them, the Reich. They were better off compared with the Czechs. Compared to them, the Czechs were poor.”
František Štilec was born on the 24th of December in 1928 in Bukovina near Čistá in the Nová Paka area. The village was inhabited mostly by Czechs whereas in the surrounding settlements, the Germans had a majority. After the Munich Agreement and consequent annexation of the Sudeten, the village became a Czech outpost. František remembers the worsening relations between the Czechs and Germans during the pre-war years as well as the expulsion of Germans after the end of the war. In Bukovina, František went to the basic school, then he attended a secondary school in Nová Paka. After having graduated from the secondary school, he enrolled a forestry college in Prague and studied road construction. After graduating from the college, he got a job in Ústí nad Labem and later in Trutnov. He was one of the project engineers of the Gočár boulevard in Hradec Králové, which included the first roundabout in the countrz. After the 1989 revolution, he opened his own studio where he worked many years after retirement. He died on the 6th of January in 2021.
The Štilec family at the turn of the 20th century. Witness' grandfather and grandmother and their children (Josef, Dana, František), all of them lived in Bukovina.
The Štilec family at the turn of the 20th century. Witness' grandfather and grandmother and their children (Josef, Dana, František), all of them lived in Bukovina.
František Štilec's grandfather sitting in front of his loom. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, weaving looms were an integral part of every household in Bukovina.
František Štilec's grandfather sitting in front of his loom. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, weaving looms were an integral part of every household in Bukovina.
