“It was in August 1969, when the revolution was restored in Prague and people revolted against the occupation again. We were at the railway station Horažďovice at that time, it is called Předměstí now, and we were loading ammunition onto train cars and the ammo was then to be taken to Prague. I was not personally loading it, I was a first lieutenant or I held a similar rank, and I directed the loading. I was simply standing by. The train did not leave for Prague, because the following day the entire revolution was put down and everything changed, the demonstrations stopped and we had to unload the ammunition again. This time I was unloading it by myself, and we were then putting the boxes with ammo back to storage racks in the ammunition depot.”
“On May 8th in the evening and on the 9th they were moving from Prague in the direction of Brdy and towards the line formed by the state road České Budějovice – Pilsen – Karlovy Vary with the intention of becoming American prisoners of war, because they knew that the road was a demarcation line and that they would find Americans there. Perhaps other squads used other routes as well, but I don’t know about it. I only witnessed the part of the Vlasov army that moved from Kasejovice towards us in Bezděkov, and they were already in the American zone and the Americans could just take them captives and take them to assembly camps. The Americans got quite scared by them, and they set up machine guns. Apart from that, they were already pretty carefree and relaxed, on the 9th they were screening movies in the village centre and talking to the villagers, and the same was happening on the 10th, and then on the 11th suddenly there arrived an army which had German uniforms with epaulettes torn off, and which was speaking Russian, and the Americans thought that this was somewhat weird. Machine guns were installed on all entry roads to the village. Negations started, and it lasted for two or three hours, and then the Americans were leading them to the village Nezdřev, accompanying them with two American tanks, and then to the village Řesanice, which was already close to the demarcation line, and then there was the village Kotouň, which was already located at the state road.”
“We spent the lunch break at the meadow next to the school, and then we had an art class, I think. Two German planes flew over, and American ground-attack planes chased them and they shot one of them down. There was a great roar as the plane was falling down somewhere over Kasejovice, and it dropped to the ground far away, in the fields somewhere behind the village Řesanice. We, boys, forgot about the art class and we ran there over the meadows and woods because we wanted to see the burning plane. We already saw that the German pilot got out with a parachute and he saved himself. The teachers scolded us for going to such a dangerous place without permission. The crashed airplane was then displayed in the railway station in Kasejovice for about five days, and then it was taken by train to Pilsen. I don’t know if the plane really arrived there or if they shot it into pieces.”
“These Russian soldiers were so miserable, because they already knew what was in store for them. If they did not get into American captivity, it would be Russian death for them. There were women, and they pulled horse-driven wagons, and on the wagons they carried their weapons and cannons and they were throwing it away along the road. People from the village were collecting their rifles and blankets, and the Vlasov soldiers were throwing away food and getting rid of things that they were unable to carry. They had their Orthodox Church priest there, and he left his liturgical instruments somewhere in Nezdřev. On the evening of May 11, we heard shooting from the direction of Kotouň, and father told me that those were heavy machine guns, but that they could be light machine guns as well. Newspapers as well as eye-witnesses reported during the following days that the Soviet army had shot all of them on the state road over there.”
A chronicler should make an effort not to leave out anything important, write truthfully and in such a way that people would like to read it even many years later
Karel Větrovec was born June 25, 1932 in Kadov in the Blatná region. His father was a teacher in Bezděkov, where the family moved soon after Karel’s birth. His mother Barbora, née Kohelová, was a housewife and she took care of Karel, his brother Josef (*1936) and his sister Marie (*1942). Karel Větrovec attended a higher elementary school in Kasejovice, where he experienced the end of the Second World War. He witnessed the air raids of American ground attack planes on the railroad from Blatná to Nepomuk. During one afternoon break in school he saw Americans shooting down one of two German airplanes which then crashed near the village Řesanice. The American army arrived to Bezděkov on May 5th and May 6th 1945, and the demarcation line ran through Lnáře, about six kilometres away from Bezděkov, and it followed the state road Pilsen - České Budějovice. On May 11th in the morning, members of Vlasov army arrived to the demarcation line from the direction of Prague and Brdy with the intention of becoming captured by the Americans, but the Americans made them turn back towards the villages Nezdřev and Řesanice. A shoot-out with the Red Army then occurred there. Immediately after the end of the war, Karel began studying the grammar school in Příbram, from which he graduated in 1951. Then he submitted his application to the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague but he was not admitted for political reasons. He thus went to study to Kutná Hora at the Institute for Ore Research for one year. Thanks to his uncle’s connections, at least he got admitted to the Faculty of Pedagogy of Charles University in Pilsen in 1952, from which he successfully graduated three years later. He was promised a teaching post at schools in Sušice or Horažďovice, but after many complications he eventually began teaching at the Eight-Year Secondary School of Zdeněk Nejedlý in Kašperské Hory, where he continued teaching until 1975 much to the dislike of the political regime. While teaching there, he met Jarmila Šmolová, a teacher of Czech language and history, who became his wife a year later. They had two daughters. Karel was also engaged in extracurricular activities: he led a cycling and hiking club, he helped out in the Svazarm organization as a referee and timekeeper, and in 1968 he began working as a storekeeper in the recently restored Junák organization (Czech Boy Scouts - transl.’s note), which made his personal profile even worse in the view of the school authorities and the Communist Party. In 1975 he thus went to work in the Mykoprodukta company in Sušice where he was gradually promoted to the post of the food inspection laboratory manager. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the city office in Kašperské Hory convinced him to return to school and become the principal’s deputy in Kašperské Hory. Karel then held this post for the following four years. In 1992 he took over the writing of the chronicle of the town of Kašperské Hory from Mr. Bártík. Karel Větrovec died on 20th December 2021.
