[So, you're one of the last surviving witnesses.] “Hunger, yeah. We got just what we had taken in the house. Well, how much we took with us depended on how much was at home. Suddenly, we only got this soup. Well, at least something. And my grandmother, her name was Futerová and she was from my mother’s side, she would bring us food. That’s how we managed to survive. No one can imagine what it was like there. People died there, and we had to bury them ourselves if we didn’t want to let them rot away there. So at night the guys would dig holes and throw the bodies inside. It was behind the Etrich factory. I wasn’t there myself, but my mom ... She told me. It was all passed through hearsay there. It all happened at night while we slept. We children. So we spent about two or three weeks there.”
“You have to imagine a column of miserable, wretched human beings. That’s what these inmates were. We were young boys so we didn’t know what to think about it. We were munching on some dried blueberries or something of the sort. It was something natural. We were chewing it and watching the procession of inmates passing by. When they realized that we were eating something, they wanted it as well. So we gave it to them. And the Germans who were guarding them just beat them back into line. They walked slowly, probably because they were miserable and exhausted. They definitely were. We went home and suddenly, in front of our village pub in Bojiště, they were lying everywhere around the yard. Farmers had to hitch a horse to a wagon, and take them up a big hill behind the village, Humburák. So we went with them as we had nothing else to do. Suddenly, they stopped and the guards drove the prisoners out into the field. Some of them attempted to flee and thus the guards shot into the air. They then came back to the cart. They loaded them up again and brought them to Nový Rokytník. There, suddenly everyone had to get out of the cart and they chased us boys away. We had to leave. And then there followed the shooting. I can show you exactly where they shot them. They shot these poor wretches who weren’t even able to walk.”
"Then came the year 1946. We were still there, they hadn’t moved us out, yet. In the records, we were kept as Germans, of course. But we stayed here in the Sudetenland. Suddenly, one day in the morning, we were ordered to move out of our house. We were only allowed to take twenty-five kilos of our belongings in a bag with us. My mother had been prepared for this, but in the confusion she accidentally took a different rucksack where she kept old rags that she had planned to repair instead of the rucksack with the nice clothes. We only found out about it at the school where we were gathered and by then it was already too late. All the people from the village had been gathered there and they were all scared, because we were surrounded by militiamen with guns. It was an awful situation. We could hear the cows mooing as they wanted to be milked. Small children were crying because they were hungry. But nobody had anything to eat except for a piece of bread. Our teacher approached one of the guards – he asked him if the women could go for a moment and milk the cows, in order to have some milk for the children. The teacher was wearing glasses and that guard gave him a blow right into his face and he smashed his glasses on his face. After that, nobody dared to go and get milk for the children. When I and my brother saw this, we said to ourselves that it was really getting bad and that we had to do something. We hadn’t seen such a brutality before. So we decided to run away and get our grandmother because in our childish naivety, we really believed that our grandmother would be able to do something about it. So we climbed over the fence and rushed to Trutnov through the fields. We heard two wounds being fired behind our backs. We got to Trutnov to the place where they dance nowadays and we got our grandmother. I don’t remember anymore how it all ended. They somehow negotiated there but I believe that she couldn’t do much about it anyway.”
František Drahovzal was born on April 27, 1934, in Bojiště, near Trutnov. He originates from a mixed ethnicity family, his father being Czech and his mother German. Shortly after the beginning of the war, his father fled across the border to join the Czechoslovak exterritorial army in the west. As a result, the family faced intimidation by the Gestapo. Life in the Sudetenland was challenging because of the ever-present misery. By the end of the war, František Drahovzal – a young boy by then – witnessed a death march and its sad end nearby Nový Rokytník. After the war had ended, the revolutionary guard came to the borderlands and the situation started to escalate. The Germans were marked with a white band wrapped around their wrist and they were persecuted. In the spring of 1946, there followed the forceful banishment of the Germans from the area. František Drahovzal and his entire family, including the youngest of the children – his only two-year-old sister – was taken to an internment camp located in the Trutnov textile works. The inmates of the camp were subjected to tough conditions. Drahovzal’s family managed to survive thanks to the help of his grandmother, who would supply them with food. After his release from the camp, František faced other hardships within the new, post-war order. He was physical assaulted, more than once, by the incoming settlers to the borderlands. At about this time, František Drahovzal learned of the death of his father, who had served as a chef in the RAF during the war. He had been killed under not yet fully clarified circumstances in Great Britain in 1943. The bereaved family was received by the president’s wife, Hana Benešová, after the war and was awarded a financial stipend. However, they lost most of the money in the subsequent monetary reform. In 1949, Drahovzal began attending a foundry apprenticeship and in 1954 he enlisted in the army. He and his wife moved to Slatina nad Úpou, where they still live today. Most of his professional life, Mr. Drahovzal spent in various positions in the agriculture business.
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!
