We were called “officers”, recalls a woman from Beskydy on her arrival in Hlučín region
Download image
Bedřiška Vašutová was born on 17 December 1934 in a cottage under the peak of Vysoká near a place called Bumbálka in the Beskydy mountains. Her father František Butora was a forest worker in the archbishop’s forests. At the age of three, the family moved to the village of Hlavatá near Bílá. There the witness grew up and experienced the conditions in the mountain solitudes in the first half of the 20th century. During the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, she smuggled tobacco across the guarded border from Slovakia. In November 1944, her father witnessed first-hand the largest raid against partisans in the territory of the Protectorate as part of the so-called Operation Grouse. Shortly before the end of the war, she saw the deportation of prisoners of war. She married a Czechoslovak People’s Army officer and moved with him to Služovice in the Hlučín region, where the army had built an anti-aircraft base to defend Ostrava. At the time of filming in 2024, she lived in Frýdek-Místek.
