"When I went to church, I was taught by Mr. Zdražila, the pastor. There was Mr. Zdražila, Antonín and Karafiát Jaroslav. Jaroslav was a very clever priest, very clever. Antonín was the youngest of them. When the Russians reached the square on the 2nd of May, because here the Russians were walking on the right bank, the Romanians were walking on the left bank of the Morava. So they went out on the steps in front of the town hall, and so it landed - I mean the town hall, in front of the parish, sorry, I'm wrong - and now it landed normally in front of the savings bank, you can still see on the steps there to this day, from the shrapnel, there are such pits there, a grenade landed normally there. This Mr. Antonín stood in front of this Mr. Zdražila, the parish priest, he was the tallest of those. And except for such a distance, he was hit right here in the dent of the neck and he was dead."
"Once when it was very cloudy, if it could have been, I don't know, 800 metres below the bottom of the clouds, we were there at Prusinky, and when they flew, you could hear how one normally is... much more the sound, it was a monotonous sound, like the horror of bees when they were at that high altitude, but this was like too much. We couldn't see it but it was audible and now all of a sudden there was this hissing and boom boom! And he was sort of relieving himself when the engines weren't going 100%, so he dropped something to keep going. And it was very lucky too, there's a place called Bakoš. I'll show you that on the map too. And that was maybe eighty meters above Bakoš, one second. And as it went lower, it just hit that Bakoš and we were maybe three hundred meters, four hundred meters away from it. Then I went there in the evening to look, with another one, and there were funnels from the bombs, of course. And there was a grove of plum trees, and there was a kind of shrapnel in that one plum tree. It was stuck. I couldn't get it out of there normally at all. And a gentleman went over and he leaned over and he took it out for me. So I got it - it was a piece of iron, coloured by the temperature or something, well, different colours - so I had it at home."
"Well, by then it was over, the planes were coming back, they were gone, and now you could see, there from Prusinky it's called Bočky and Bělcovy, the B-17 did a circuit over the airfield and did a second circuit again and apparently wanted to land, only it was being shot at. It flew over Napajedla, at Cvilingrová, that's the name of it, below Zmola, so the Germans had a machine gun twin there as well, a machine gun, and they were shooting at it as well, and it flew and we really, I can show you on this drawing, it was really a piece of it as it flew. We said: Oops, where's he going to land? He must have been a good pilot because his right engines were going, his left engines were not going, both of them, the inner one was smoking. And he still had to use the rudder, probably normally, because it would still be turning in, and he still landed - like to the right - and he landed in this field called America."
Stanislav Trávníček was born shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, on 28 July 1938. He spent his childhood in Halenkovice near Napajedla, where he experienced real village life and learned many traditional household chores - from flour milling to the production of homemade soaps. The end of the Second World War, when an American B-17G bomber made an emergency landing near Napajedla, prevented by German gunners from landing at the airport in Otrokovice, was particularly memorable in his life. He witnessed the emergency landing of the plane and the inglorious end of its crew. He also experienced the impact of a grenade in Napajedla, which led to the death of the local chaplain. After the war, Stanislav Trávníček joined the Fatra company, where he later became the manager. In 2023, he was still living in Napajedla in the Zlín Region.
