"At that time I was working in Tonetovka [TON company] in Holešov, in the morning we had already heard about the occupation on the radio. We went to work, but the foreman sent us home. There are barracks in Holešov on the way to Přílepy. The tanks were already standing there and I just remember that I had a splitting headache. At home, I picked up the kids and we all went to my parents' house in Na Větřici. We were watching at the Holešov barracks and the airfield and watching the soldiers going back and forth. Our grandfather, my father-in-law, was half Georgian. He didn't speak a word of Russian, but he was sitting with the soldiers on a field and debating with them. They were young boys, they could not even make a head or tail of it. My grandfather told them that his Georgian father was supposed to pay him alimony for fifty-two years. After all, his mother had been in a sugar factory after World War I where there were Russian prisoners. Among them, a Georgian, with whom she had an affair. She got pregnant and they arranged to marry and go to Georgia. Whether he was just promising her or whether he really meant it, I don't know, but when she and her mother came packed, the soldier was not there. Maybe he didn't even have to run away, but maybe in the morning he got the order, 'Let's go!' and there it was. I always have to remember that Stalin was called Dzhugashvili and that our great-grandfather was called Sakashvili, as was a Georgian president. Then I used to say to my father-in-law, 'Dad, your uncle there is the president.'"
"We got to Přílepy because my dad had several siblings. His youngest brother on the farm. The one who had been killed by the Germans when the partisans from Přílepy killed two Germans between Lukoveček and Přílepy. The Germans retaliated later. My uncle was walking to the fields that way, because we still have fields there, he was curious what was happening there. Anyone who went there was picked up randomly by the Germans. They took them to the barracks in Holešov, where they tortured them, perhaps, and then shot them in the field near Třebětice. There is even a granite memorial by the road. My uncle was the youngest, he was thirty years old, unmarried, handsome, and when he died, the girls who had fancied him accompanied his coffin, as was the custom in those days. The one with the broken candle went first, and then the other bridesmaids. My uncle wasn't a partisan, but my aunt said he helped the partisans. They used to sleep in our house and once he killed a calf so they could have something to eat. They were such partisans... I don't know."
"We have one more memory of Vizovice. We were there on a trip and I remembered how we had been there with my mother during the war. There was a hornbeam alley growing along the path, and there were beams and on them were hung, my mother said, Vlasov army soldiers. There was also a farm wagon for potatoes and all sorts of things. It was lined with brushwood, and there was a young blond man lying on it, with blood coming out of his ear and his head hanging down from the side. That was so stuck in my head, I hadn´t remembered it until I came to the place again. I guess it's like when you see a shot in a movie."
Amálie Gajdošíková, née Sovadinová, was born on 16 December 1940 in Baťa Hospital in Zlín. She lived with her parents and siblings in a Baťa house in the Letná district. It was here that she experienced the bombing of Zlín, which damaged her family home so much that the whole family had to move to Vizovice and later to Prlov. Her earliest memories of the war are connected both with the bombs over the Baťa factories and with the executed partisans in the park of the Vizovice castle. Her father came from Přílepy, near Holešov. It was here that the family moved to the family farm Na Větřici after the war. The farm was left behind her uncle Rudolf Sovadin, who had been arrested and executed by the Nazis for helping the partisans. Most of Amálie Gajdošíková‘s memories are also connected with Přílepy. She grew up there at the time when the last countess of Přílepy, Terezie Seilernová, was staying at the castle. She also experienced the occupation in Přílepy in 1968. She and her husband Miroslav raised two daughters, and for most of her life she worked as a switchboard operator. In 2015, she was widowed when her husband decided to end his own life at the age of seventy-six. Amálie Gajdošíková lives alone in his family home, takes care of her grandchildren or sews witch dolls, which she has exhibited several times.
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!
