Bohuslav Vrána

* 1930

  • "Jaroslav Dedeček. He was used to his life and he didn't like this much and they made him chairman. At that time in agriculture, the communists called the big farmers kulaks and moved them out of the villages to somewhere on the borderlands. And they were his best friends. He had to prepare himself for that, he even told me once when we were working together in the field and tying some sheaves, he said, 'This is not for me, I'd rather take my own life.' I was telling my wife, we were married by then, that he was talking like that to keep him safe, that he had that mindset about life. And it really came down to that. About three peasants were to leave, and as chairman he was to give his consent. And he didn't, and he went to see one of them the same day... I left for work in the morning, I was already on the bus at 3:30 to Green Grove. So he says goodbye to me in the yard, I say goodbye. Then he went to see a plant breeder who worked for us, a Mr. Podobsky. And convinced him to take it, that he couldn't do it. Mr Podobsky told us: he was on his knees in front of me, crying for me to take it. He left him there, and there was a house, a cottage, just below me, where I live. There was half a barn and half a room, and in that room he had a workshop, and that's where he hung himself. His brother found him there."

  • "It was about an hour, and my mom said, 'Dad, someone's knocking on the door.' My dad said it was nothing, it was geese. And after a while again, so he went into the hallway and asked who was there. The Germans answered. Since both parents spoke perfect German, dad told them - they wanted clothes and food - so dad said, 'I'm not giving you anything, go away.' They started kicking and banging on the door, but the door was new for a fortnight. Otherwise, that one, if they leaned on it, they were right in. My parents opened the window to the garden. And they called for help, but the Mayday patrol was down at the edge of town, so they didn't hear." - "How far away was that?" - "It was far away, you couldn't hear it. So dad decided, as he was dressed in his night clothes, he jumped into the garden, and as he jumped out the window, that's when they started shooting. It was shots into the house. Me and my brother got under the bed, the house was just shaking. And my mom got the shock that they were gonna shoot my dad. So I didn't know what to do. I poured out, I didn't think about anything, and I flew to the neighbors, to where Liba Plichtová lived, because her son was also a resistance fighter and we knew that he had a gun there. But they [the Germans] apparently pulled away and the May fighters didn't arrive with the car until an hour later."

  • "He was working with a German at that workplace. My dad only came home once a week during the winter. He slept with some people and listened to the radio there. At work, he and another friend would talk and tell each other about it. The German overheard it, and he turned my dad in. So the Gestapo took him to Jičín, and he was there for almost a week, and they interrogated him, and he said that he didn't wish it on anybody. And they still wanted to know, because we didn't have any electricity in Popelky, and they still wanted to know where he was listening. And dad said, 'Well, I heard it on the train.'"

  • "On May 10, the Russian army was here in the square. Here was glory, everything! And this street that goes to Popelky, it was full of carts of German refugees with horses. And we, when we were walking home, my father and I, after the glory, we were about in the middle of the street and suddenly there was shooting. My dad turned around and he saw that somebody was shooting, so we jumped, Mr. Večernik lived here, he was a lawyer, and there was this door like a drowned in the house. So we jumped in and it was unlocked, so we hid there. When all the noise stopped, we came out. I don't wish that on anybody, there were so many dead bodies."

  • "We went to school here for the six years of World War II. It was complicated because then the Hitler Youth, the Hitler Youth, moved into the school. We went to school in shifts. Girls one week in the morning and the other in the afternoon, so we alternated. And we attended on Saturdays too. In 1945, when the war ended, I was finishing school."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Lomnice nad Popelkou, 25.05.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 56:59
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Turnov, 11.04.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:32:56
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

After the end of the war, he hid from gunfire from liberators and escaped prisoners

Bohuslav Vrána during compulsory military service
Bohuslav Vrána during compulsory military service
photo: Archive of the witness

Bohuslav Vrána was born on 9 September 1930 in Harrachov, but the family soon moved to Lomnice nad Popelkou. During the economic crisis, his parents had to pay off their mortgage and were not in a good financial position. In 1943, the Gestapo arrested Josef Vrána’s father for listening to foreign radio, they interrogated him, but he did not give his acquaintances away. At the end of the war, on May 10, 1945, he experienced a shootout and a massacre of German civilians in Lomnica nad Popelkou. On the same day, the house of the Vránas was attacked by fleeing German soldiers. After the war, Bohuslav Vrána became an apprentice and later graduated from an industrial school in Mladá Boleslav. In 1952 he got married. His father-in-law Jaroslav Dědeček was forced to become the chairman of a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD) and had to evict his closest friends from the village, which he refused. Events related to collectivisation drove him to suicide. During the second wave of collectivisation in 1957, his brother-in-law at first refused to join the cooperative, but after pressure from the Communists he finally did. After 1989, the family acquired the property they had collected, and the deceased and his brother-in-law turned to farming. In 2022, Bohuslav Vrána was living in Žďár.