“They kept beating me, those State Security men, they gave me such a thrashing, there was blood all over me. They knocked my teeth out. They were monsters! Monsters in human form, criminals, plain and simple.”
“In Nový Hrozenkov, there was a primary school, and I remember they caught those two young people who wanted to run off to Slovakia to join the partisans. They caught them, there was this big station, all those houses were still there. People were living there. And you could cross the border at Javorníky, to cross the ridges of Javorníky to Slovakia. And they caught those two young boys, and after that, the whole school, we had to go to take a look – they hung them. On a bridge across the Bečva river, they would just hang them at the place, and we had to come, everyone from our school, to see them just hanging there. That was ugly. Those were ugly times indeed.”
“The fascists went past our sweet shop in an open car, we had this little garden in front of our house, in front of the sweet shop, and I started throwing rocks at those fascists. And they would jump out of the car, the SS, and: 'We will deal with you, we will close down this business of yours!' My father spoke German and Italian as well. 'We will close it down, move you out and destroy the house!' Well it was ugly. My aunt Marietta came from the garden, she started speaking German, told them she has been living in Vienna. I tried to hide in a currant bush, but they would drag me out, those fascists, and started beating me up. And aunt Marietta saved the day, as they would let me go.”
Vladislav Trampota was born on 20 April 1932 in the town of Karolinina Huť (today’s Karolinka) in the Vsetín region. Her parents, Bedrřich and Anastázie, ran a renowned sweet shop in the town. During the war they would listen to banned radio broadcasts from abroad, her father had been supplying the partisans. After the coup of February 1948, her parents lost their successful business. In 1951, witness’ cousin, Sigmund Bakala, had been executed by the communists as a member of ‘Hory Hostýnské’, an anti-regime resistance group. As a result, Vladislav decided to cross the border illegally and emigrate to Vienna, where his father’s sister was living. When he tried to cross the border on 5 September 1953 he was apprehended by the Border Guard and sentenced for ten months in Vinařice near Kladno, a prison at a deep coal mine. After that he had to enlist the Auxiliary Technical Battalion in Ostrava. From the late 1950s, he had been working at Pramen national enterprise in Brno. After the Velvet Revolution he was rehabilitated. In 1996, with a group of Czechoslovak RAF servicemen, he met Queen Elizabeth II accompanied by Václav Havel during her visit to Brno. When the interview took place (2021) Vladislav Trampota had been living in Brno.
