How I met the war in Brod
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František Varaďa was born on September 22, 1932 in Uherský Brod. At the age of seven, just after the Second World War had started, he experienced the arrival of German soldiers. During the war, he saw changes in society and school through a child’s eyes. In his street, the Gestapo arrested resistance movement members, and numerous transports of Jews, of which only a handful returned home after the war, were sent out of the city. František also saw an air battle with his own eyes. After the war, he started a school in Varnsdorf on the North Bohemian border, he trained to become a knitting machines mechanic and then passed the school-leaving examination at the Higher Technical School in Brno. During the military service, which he served from 1952 to 1954, he joined the Communist Party. He started to work in the arms factory in Uherský Brod. Being a young communist, he had to go to farmers to persuade them to join cooperative farms. However, he resented it and he announced to the management that he would no longer carry out such an activity. As a punishment, he was reassigned to a worse job position. He got married, and with his wife Ludmila they raised two daughters, Marcela and Stanislava. František Varaďa definitively broke up with the Communist Party after the August occupation in 1968. Daughter Marcela could not then study her dream school. František Varaďa wrote the book How I Met the War in Brod about what he experienced as a child in his hometown.
