František Zahrádka

“There was a Scout camp in Velenice region in 1946. And the Germans and Austrians were kind of getting ready for their resettlement already. Simply the Sudeten Germans were getting ready for their resettlement already, they knew it already. But simply after an agreement with our camp leader we used to help with harvesting the crops. The Germans said: 'It's going to be yours already.' And then when someone wasn't careful enough when throwing the corn from a dray, they were carting the corn with cows and oxen, you see, so the Germans said: 'Langsam, langsam, ganze schito kaput!' ('Slowly, slowly, the rye is all ruined!') OK. So I hated the Germans in a terrible way, it took me a very long time. But there I had the feeling thy were probably also just humans.”

“My father was transferred on business to Meziměstí u Broumova. I started attending school there in 1936 and we were basically growing up with German children. There were no problems till 1936-1937. The guys about 3 or 4 years older used to say in 1937 already: 'Just you wait, you'll go.' And then the Germans even prohibited their children from playing with us, although some of them were polite people. I got to know about president Masaryk's death on September 14th, 1937 in the way that my father led me to school. On our way we were stopped by a German owner of a pub in Meziměstí u Broumova, who ran towards us. With tears in his eyes he was telling my Dad that president Masaryk died that he heard it on the radio. We had a radio practically only at the end of the war. And the German had really tears in his eyes and he said: 'It will be nothing good.'”

“In the morning I was at work as usual. I came home, washed my hands, looked at the clock what time it was. And as I was washing my hands, suddenly two guys jumped upon me, as I later found out, they were from the intelligence, comrade Reicin, and they knocked me down. They found my ČZ 635 with nine bullets, eight in the magazine and the ninth one in the barrel. This gun has no lock, you release it just by pulling the trigger. And they say: ´Look, this bastard had a bullet in the barrel ready for us.´ So they gave me a thrashing right at the spot.”

“The trial with our group took place on December 8-9th, 1949. There were twenty-three of us. Death penalty was required for three of us: me, Müller, and Bárta. Three people from the Vodňany group were released: a sister of one guy whom I led across the border, and a sister of one boy-scouts member. So our number was reduced to twenty; seventeen boy-scouts, me, and two soldiers then remained in the court room. The chief prosecutor was general Vaněk, drunk as a Dane, shouting in a gruff voice like a cow. There was such an episode, when this general Vaněk somehow began to insist that there was evidence that I had to carry out espionage activities for a financial reward. The penalty for this was the rope, no doubt about it. Right, they had this law, or section 113 about democratized judicial system, and according to this, death penalty could not be carried out on persons under twenty. But here in the list of the executed we have six names of the people, whom they sentenced to capital punishment when they turned twenty, and they executed them as soon as they as they entered into the twentieth year after their birth. Thus we have one person here, who was nineteen years and eight months, and he got the rope. And the senate’s chairman was dr. Volf at that time.”

“Then I made contacts with soldiers, they knew that I was crossing the line as if nothing was happening. A group was arranged; we agreed I would eventually pick up six people. We met with the last couple south of Hartmanice. Two soldiers in civilian clothing and one tradesman, they went with me all the way from České Budějovice by train to Horažďovice, and then to Sušice. When the whole group was finally assembled, there were already rumours that the border patrol southeast of Železná Ruda was shooting quite often. So I planned the route accordingly, from soldiers I had information that a big shooting range for the army was being built in the area between Velká Voda, Prášily and Srní, this passage leading over Poledník. I anticipated there would be chaos, there will be many military trucks riding there, so I decided we would first head in that direction. After midnight there was a storm, and behind us a shooting incident aimed at another group of people crossing the border occurred. We could hear the dogs barking, children crying. We were about four hundred metres from the border line on Poledník. One of the officers in our group took the compass. I knew that four hundred metres below Poledník there is a nice path through dense wood leading towards Bavaria and to that border stone n. 16. At that time, however, I did not know there was a border stone number sixteen. I was lucky then, because I managed to get hold of a special detailed map scale 1: 75 000, which came from the times of the early republic, and all the forest clearings were marked there with beautiful precision. So I knew that I would walk through the forest towards the first clearing, I would pass four clearings and then I had to arrive to the border stone n. 16. When they opened fire at that other group, however, we had to cut it short, and I did not feel well, I had almost nothing with me, so I said to myself: ´There’s nothing else to do, anyway, so I’ll go to Bavaria then.”

“After all the experiences in my life, like the Nazi occupation, the escape over the border, then the Bolshevik persecution, imprisonment, the year 1968, which inspired wonderful hopes in us, and then 1989, a brief period when we thought we have won... I came to a belief that if we claim we are guys who have guts, we need to resist evil – always. And that it may sometimes seem that this fight will never be won, it does not matter. But one thing is clear: had the good always dominated over the evil just by a tiny little bit in this never-ending struggle, today we would have been still hiding in caves or climbing the trees like monkeys and living in the present, in my experience, over all these colossal histories of billions years, but living like pigs in clover.”

“My name is František Zahrádka, I was born on October 30th, 1930, which means I will be 78 in two months. My father was a legionnaire, and my mother an assistant worker, she worked in brickworks, and so on. We were quite a poor family, because my dad was a handicapped war veteran from the fighting against the Bolsheviks. For when the legionnaires were coming home on Christmas 1918, their 32nd artillery regiment was immediately transferred to Slovakia. So my father had hardly any time to stop at his mother’s place, because on their way east they passed through Tábor where she lived. Immediately afterward he went to Slovakia, and in June Slovakia already began to be occupied by Hungarian Bolsheviks led by Béla Kun. Of course, the legions were dusting their jackets. When the city of Miskolz in Hungary was captured, my father was hit by a hand grenade while on guard, and he basically remained partly handicapped till the end of his life. He limped. Then he found employment with the railways as a gatekeeper, a supporting worker, and he worked there till his death. He did not even live till his retirement, he died at the age of sixty-one and my mother died when she was fifty-one.”