"[A Partisan] Bek was there arranging to get the bread. And the Germans who went from Lukov to Kašava, stopped at the baker's, and there was Bek, arranging to get the bread. And the Gestapo flew in there and wanted an ID card from him, and instead of an ID card, he pulled out a browning and shot. And it had begun."
"There was such a big, how to say… It fell apart. I was in the wall and I was throwing. I was in Karviná and there were four-meter layers. Not in Ostrava, there were forty centimeters in Ostrava, I was not there, but I was in Karviná. And there it fell. And there was also one part-time worker, well, it fell on him. It caught him. I managed to escape, we had to go into such a hole and they gave us, it was called a scraper, we threw coal at it. As it started to break, it started to hum, so we all had to run, but we couldn't all get in there, so the one who followed me hit me in the ass with a stone to move in. But there was nowhere to run. If it were possible, but it was not possible. And then, as we climbed to the main corridor, it stopped humming, it kind of stopped and it caught his legs, the legs of my friend. I saw it, so I got so scared that I resigned right away. I had to leave from there."
"The Germans drove a Red Cross car from Lhotka, and I saw that they took the German man, they went under the hill for him, they took him and opened the car. There was a scream, in that car! There were gunshots and many dead people. And they took him, threw him there, he shouted, he spoke, but nothing helped. And it was a terrible sight as we watched his guts hang from…"
Karel Bořuta was born on April 19, 1927 in the village Kašava in the Zlín region. He completed elementary school in the 1930s, then trained to be an electrician. During his studies he worked in Svit in Zlín, later in the nationalized original Baťa plant. From 1944 to 1945, he helped Soviet partisans from the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka, who were active in and around Kašava. This assistance consisted mainly of food supplies. In the 1940s, he got a job as a miner in the coal mines in Karviná. After a mining accident in 1947, from which he just escaped unharmed, he left the miner position. He completed his compulsory military service in the years 1949 to 1953 in Moravská Třebová, Holešov and Nové Mesto nad Váhom in Slovakia. During the war, he signed to join the Communist Party, but left when he returned. After the military service, he had been working as a signalman at a telephone exchange in Zlín until his retirement in 1987. Karel Bořuta died on August 2nd, 2022.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
