"The crowds counted thousands of people. It was mostly students who came to the funeral of Jan Opletal on November 15. The crowds marched at first around Charles Square and then towards Wilson train station, where the coffin was loaded on a train which took it to his native region for the burial. He was buried there. The demonstration then went on mainly on Wenceslas Square. People were shouting and singing the national anthem. Hej Slované and things like that."
"We boarded a passenger train early in the morning and we definitely weren't handled with kid gloves. There was a German soldier standing at each compartment and the window curtains had to be down. The train departed from Ruzyně and we didn't see too much from our windows – as there was a German soldier with a machine gun patrolling us and the curtains were down. We only found out that we were rolling to the north. We only reacted when we crossed the border and when we arrived to Berlin in the evening around 10 o'clock. From Berlin, we continued our journey and we only got to our final destination at about two o'clock in the night. It was called Oranienburg."
"The camp was… Well, I'll tell you. There were five of us sleeping on two straw mattresses. In the morning, we had to get dressed and tidy ourselves. Then we had to line up on the court of the concentration camp. The court was massive with the individual blocks radially surrounding it. We had to get in line on that court according to the blocks that we were living on. The person in charge of our block was a German. He was called the 'Blockälteste', the senior on the block. He was responsible for taking us to the court and for reporting the numbers of the inmates on the block."
"Around six o'clock we were loaded on trucks and taken to the garrison in Ruzyně. After we had jumped down from the platform, we had to run through a corridor made up of German soldiers holding clubs in their hands. Put simply, as you were running through that narrow corridor, you got a good beating from the Germans. We went to the garrison, to the riding hall, where we found a large number of other students that had already arrived there. There was a considerable number of students there."
"We were marked. A political prisoner had a red-triangle mark. The Czechs had a number and the triangle was beneath that number. The Germans had a number and the triangle was above the number. The Poles had a number and the triangle was on the other side. They were all university students. Wawel – that's a university in Krakow and surprisingly we all communicated in German, because my Polish was bad. We blamed them for not having helped us against the Germans and for seizing a part of our territory instead. I can only tell you that it didn't resonate too well with them."
Ing. Miloslav Fencl was born on February 19, 1919, in the municipality of Nové Vráto near České Budějovice. He attended a grammar school until the fourth grade and then left the school and studied at a technical school. The parents of Miloslav Fencl died very early on and he became an orphan. However, thanks to the property he inherited from his parents, he could afford to take up studies of architecture and building construction at the ČVUT (the Czech Technical University in Prague). He lived at the Masaryk College and his trustee (he hadn‘t reached his legal age yet) became his uncle. On October 28, 1939, Miloslav Fencl participated in a demonstration in the streets of Prague. On the very same day, the student Jan Opletal was seriously wounded by a shot and died soon afterwards. Two weeks later, on November 15, 1939, his funeral took place, which occasioned another bout of student demonstrations against the German occupation regime. The demonstrations resulted in the arrest of university students residing in the Prague dormitories on November 17. Miloslav Fencl was arrested together with other students and taken to Prague-Ruzyně. Here the students were first assembled in the Ruzyně riding hall and subsequently transferred to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg. In the concentration camp, Miloslav worked in the construction of a port and the construction of a sewerage system in Oranienburg. In December 1940, he was released from the camp and went back home to České Budějovice. However, as all the Czech universities had been closed, he was unable to continue in his studies and during a mandatory reporting at the Gestapo, he even learned that he was supposed to be sent to Germany to forced labor. However, thanks to the help of an acquainted doctor and a heart defect, he was able to avoid forced labor and instead found work at a vocational school in Votice, where he taught bricklaying apprentices. Just shortly before the end of the war, he joined the Revolutionary National Committee in Nové Vráto. After the war, he re-enrolled at the university and wanted to continue his studies, but for financial reasons he had to terminate his studies and find himself a job. He started working in Stod nearby Plzeň at a vocational school. Later, he enrolled again at the Czech Technical University where he finally completed his studies in architecture and building construction in 1959. Meanwhile, he was promoted to the position of director of a vocational school in Domažlice, from where, however, he left to teach at a technical school in Plzeň due to a disagreement with the school‘s leadership. Finally – because of his wife‘s parents – he returned to České Budějovice where he taught at a technical high school and later became the school‘s director. In 1979, he retired and until his death in 2011 lived in České Budějovice.
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!
