“Šebkovice are administered from Jaroměřice. I know the Plichta brothers from the farming school. And we also knew each other from the People’s Party youth movement. All the people were members of the Czechoslovak People’s Party here. Thus we knew each other quite well. What drew us together was farming and the resistance toward agricultural cooperatives.”
“They didn’t even have a jail in Horn and therefore they took us to Eggenburg. We were detained there for three days. A window suddenly opened and we heard a voice: ´Boys, I can speak Czech, I served in Brno in Špilberk in WWI.´ It was nice when one could suddenly hear Czech spoken. Then they took us to Krems. I began to suspect it. We got to the Russian commandery there.”
“I arrived home and went to register myself. There were so-called home-books at that time and every person had to be registered there, it had to be reported to the town-hall. My brother Jiří was at home and then he left and forgot to unregister. I took the book and went to the town-hall and the official Čermák started reproaching me that my brother had not unregistered and that father should have unregistered him instead. I replied that they were bothering my father, accusing him of not surrendering the required amount of crops, and making hell of his life, and the official got angry. The town-hall secretary came in and asked: ´What’s the shouting here?´ The official replied that Tesař was arguing here and we had an argument. The secretary told me to go upstairs to his office. He himself invited me, I didn’t go to him myself, as he later claimed. The chairman of the cooperative and two other people came there. During the prosecution later he wrote that I was denigrating their beneficial activities. This is what the charges against people who protested against them and didn’t want to comply looked like.”
“I said to Tonda (Plichta) that I would cross the border and find out if it was a local organization or if it was organized from the outside. I would then return or send a message. I left at night on June 27, I didn’t go to work that evening. Two boys wanted to go with me. In the evening one of them said: ´Guys, I’m afraid,´ so we told him to stay at home. If he was afraid, he couldn’t go with us. We set out. We walked for about a kilometre from Uherčice to Vratěnín and we got to Austria. But we probably should have walked further and not stayed on the border. We were so happy that we got to Austria that we stopped right behind the border line and a policeman caught us in the morning when he saw us walking through a field. He noticed we were dressed differently than the people who were going to work there. So we were not lucky.”
“We had to take him home from the prison with broken spine. They were preparing some tables. Father and one other man were carrying a table and as they were walking, some brick was jutting out in the way and he stumbled on it and the table fell on him. He had one vertebra cleft and one crushed. When the boys came to visit him, he was lying on a plank. Then we had to carry him home, because he couldn’t walk. My mother’s brother went there with me. When he arrived home, the comrade district doctor came immediately – the doctor’s brother was a member of the secret police in Jihlava, where they have beaten the people from Babice – and he immediately sent father to Třebíč and he was then lying there in a plaster-bed for half a year.”
František Tesař was born on 25 August 1932 in Moravské Budějovice, where his family had lived for a long time. His parents had one of the largest farms in Moravské Budějovice, where he worked from the time he was a small boy. His grandfather, father, and later he himself, were active members of the People’s Party (ČSL). While studying in farming school in Jaroměřice nad Rokytnou, he met Stanislav and Antonín Plichta and Jan Podveský, who would later become a priest. Shortly before the so-called Babice action, Podveský sent him to warn the Plichtas that the police knew about their activities. On 27 June 1951 he decided to illegally leave the country, hoping to find out about Ladislav Malý’s illegal work in Austria. However, he was arrested and expatriated back to Czechoslovakia. On 28 August 1951 he was sentenced to one year in prison which he served out in Jihlava, Zbýšov, Brno-Cejl and in Jáchymov. In 1953 he had to go into the army in special troops called PTP (Auxiliary Technical Units); at that time he was also prosecuted for sedition but in the end he was freed. His father was also imprisoned for being a kulak, a village rich, and during his imprisonment his backbone was seriously injured. In 1968 František Tesař became a member of K231 (an organisation of political prisoners) and helped to work on the renewed People’s Party. In the late 1980s he and his wife demonstrated against communism. After 1989 he worked for a short time for a town council and in 1992 he started a farm again. His creed is based on the faith in God. František Tesař died in 4 January 2012.
