"There was a large military garrison in Zbraslav, a detachment of the SS was quartered in the Zbraslav castle and towards the end of the war the school was emptied and German soldiers were quartered there too. We lived directly opposite the school, so we watched all those soldiers moving out sometime in April 1945. They were leaving in the direction of Dobříš and probably to be taken prisoner by the Americans. On the evening of May 5, we found that people were painting all the German signs with white paint, so we, as children, guessed that the war was probably over. Which was true, but the next day, May 6, a group of people gathered in front of the National Committee and started to arm themselves. Someone brought guns and bullets and they were going to defend Zbraslav against those German SS troops. And all of a sudden, German troops, armed, started advancing from the square, in crowds, alongside the barracks, and from that armed group that was standing in front of the National Committee, somebody fired at those German soldiers. And at that moment the shooting started, they fired back. We had to rush away from the window and they moved us right into the basement, and there we had to survive the shooting, which lasted until the afternoon hours. And then when we came back to the apartment in the afternoon, we found a man in overalls lying dead on the sidewalk not far from our house, and in another street in front of the pharmacy an SS man was lying dead, and we were all scared as children."
"After graduating from primary school and municipal school, I wanted to study at grammar school, but unfortunately the education committee of the then National Action Committee did not want to give me a recommendation to study. And they wanted to send me to Ostrava to be re-educated as a capitalist child in the mines. But fortunately, there was a parish priest of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church on that committee who interceded on my behalf, saying that anyone could go to the mines, but if someone learns well at school, he is smart, so he should go to study, because the state would get much more out of it. So they eventually gave me that recommendation to go to the grammar school, it was an eleven year secondary school then. I don't know whether he did it out of pure altruism or out of such solidarity that I had gone to altar as a younger boy and he knew that, so as a kind of ecumenical solidarity he recommended this to me. I graduated from the grammar school, but it was quite difficult because at that time, when my mother died and my aunt took care of us, we didn't really have much money of our own. Our property was nationalised and what we had in the bank became so-called tied deposits, which could only be disposed of with the permission of the court. From this we received an orphan's pension, and if we wanted to buy winter clothes or something extra, we had to apply, that is, not us, but our guardian, to release a certain amount of money, for example, to buy winter clothes for us."
"To be honest, I had thought that I would become a famous scientist and that I would be an official at the Presidium of the Academy, that I would become famous... but in the sixties I fell off my perch and I found that I had no such prospects if I was not in the party. Even at one time, just after that period of normalisation, when there were background checks and when a lot of people had left the party, there was some thought of getting new members into the party. And even the choice fell on me that I should be offered membership in the party. But fortunately they sent a representative of the communist committee of the Academy to Zbraslav, to the place where I lived, to see if I was a suitable candidate for the party. And then the comrade came back with the fact that I had a religious upbringing, that I had been an altar boy, and that I was of bourgeois origin, so the communists changed their minds and didn't offer it to me at all. For which I was very grateful, because at that time it was very difficult to refuse the offer of party membership because it meant that you were a reactionary - and that would have changed my whole destiny. So that's how I tried to be loyal and that's how I was eventually allowed to travel, but only to socialist or developing countries. I was not allowed to go to capitalist ones."
"The Prague Spring filled me with great hope that the whole situation would change, but unfortunately the entry of Soviet troops destroyed all my hopes. At that time I understood that if I wasn't in the party I wouldn't be a communist, which I never was, so I didn't have a great professional career. So I decided to collect stamps. I devoted a lot of energy and a lot of effort to that, in addition to my professional scientific work. I even worked my way up to the point where my collections were awarded gold medals at some exhibitions."
"I have to say that my childhood was not very happy. I lost my dad when I was four years old. My mother died when I was eleven, so my sister and I were left alone. Luckily, we were raised by my mom's sister, our aunt, so the loss of my parents wasn't that big. However, our parents had been rich. We were basically children of the bourgeoisie, so when the communist government came in, unfortunately we were a bit persecuted. They took away most of our property, but since our parents were already dead, the communists eventually let us graduate."
"Unfortunately, I experienced the Second World War as a child. We were always at home, we were not allowed to go anywhere. There were German soldiers everywhere. We also experienced the revolution, when we were being shot at. We lived in Zbraslav and there was a big shooting in the streets, so we had to hide in the basement. Fortunately, the Russians came and we welcomed them, but that's another chapter."
František Dusbábek was born on 4 January 1937 in Prague. He grew up in Zbraslav (now Prague 5) in a well-to-do family of a lawyer. The family owned a house in Zbraslav and František‘s father also bought a chateau with farmland in southern Bohemia shortly before the war. However, in 1940 his father died unexpectedly and seven years later František‘s mother passed away. František and his one year older sister were then taken care of by an aunt. At the age of eight, he witnessed the dramatic events associated with the end of the war, when Zbraslav found itself surrounded by SS troops. After the communist coup, most of the property that the Dusbábek siblings inherited from their parents was nationalized. Although they found themselves completely destitute and lived in very poor conditions for the following years, they were considered children of bourgeois origin and were treated accordingly. The gifted František was not to be allowed to continue his studies after the municipal school, instead he was to be sent to work and re-educate in the Ostrava coal mines. The fact that this did not happen in the end was due to the Zbraslav parish priest, who convinced the local action committee of the contrary and František was recommended to study. After graduating from secondary school, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Science of Charles University and his thesis already brought him to the attention of the scientific community. He spent most of his professional career at the Institute of Parasitology of the Academy of Sciences in České Budějovice. However, he never joined the Communist Party, which, especially during the so-called normalisation period, brought him an unwanted professional decline. Moreover, in the early 1980s, František Dusbábek was contacted by State Security , which selected him as a candidate for secret cooperation because of his professional qualities and supposed contacts. He refused to cooperate with them. It was only after 1989 that he was able to fully devote himself to his profession, and at the same time the family was given back most of its original property in restitution. František Dusbábek is a world-renowned scientist in the field of parasitology, he is married and in 2023 was living in Zbraslav.
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!
