Jindřich Tesař

"When I was a small boy I had a girl friend whose mother started seeing a German soldier by the end of the first republic. He was from the borderlands, nearby Jevíčko, and as a German, he had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. Her mother thought that he left her because of her. So she took her to the pond in Cetkovice and threw her into the water. She started to scream, the people would come to her help and eventually managed to fish her out, but she was already dead. She was our friend, living next door to where I lived. It was such a shock for me to see that something was wrong with human society. I felt that it was necessary to help others. I tried to help throughout my life whenever I could."

"He was a university student, his name was Pelikán. He fled from Olomouc and made it to the forests of the Drahanská vrchovina highlands. We were in touch with the foresters from there as we would supply them with fugitives whom they accompanied farther eastwards. Pelikán came to a cottage that was located in isolation nearby Cetkovice. We didn't know what to do with him. If they had found out that a stranger was there… because they would visit the cabins, monitoring what was going on there. Somebody told my dad that in one of the neighboring villages, in Kořenec, they needed a secretary. This boy was a university student so he was allowed to stay there under a different name, working as a secretary. After the war, he left and visited all the people that had helped him. He went to Prague and later became the director of the broadcasting and then the television."

"There used to be a merchant in Cetkovice, his name was Zdražil, and he would supply cottage cheese to his customers, but sometimes also oil. We used that oil to smear it on the railway tracks on the hill between Cetkovice and Šebetov. The slippery tracks prevented the train from passing that section because the wheels would spin and it wouldn't come up the hill. This, of course, immediately resulted in a large-scale police investigation. Luckily, the Czech police officers warned us to disappear. Then we started to do the same but on the tracks from Skalice to Březová. However, it didn't work so well there as the hill wasn't that steep and the train was able to make it up if it went fast enough."

"My father called me. By then I already had a car. Before that, I lived in a tiny village that was isolated from the outside world. He asked me to give him a ride to Hranice. He said that it was because of the church, that it had been closed and the service would be held at the parsonage from now on. As I was working as a teacher I told him not to tell anybody about it. I wouldn't tell about it either. So we got into the car and went to Hranice. We drove to a place of one of his friends. He greeted my father and asked him what he had brought him. My father replied: 'I brought you something but first I need to know what I'll get from you'. That guy was the director of a brick factory in Hranice. My father told him that the church in their place was falling apart, there were cracks in the walls and they couldn't serve the holly mass there. They were really good friends so he told him: 'Franta, I'm a Communist, you can't ask me to save a church'. But my dad said: 'Come on, you don't want me to have to explain to the people that the Communists don't want us to hold our service in the church'. So he said: 'how much do you need'? My dad said: 'I don't know, maybe two or three railway carloads. Then I went to the car and brought a huge container with schnapps. That's how they got even. The bricks were brought to the church and it was actually enough to even expand it a little bit."