Ing. František Hlavatý

“During the war we felt much anti-German, but immediately after the war the Russians came. People are tougher in the military, they come on strong. Besides us there were tents with soldiers and three officers walked right into our flat, took our bedroom and invited German girls there. They took what they liked – dresses for the girls, they took our father’s car. When they went to fetch the girls, they crushed it. My dad was the first man in our village to have a passenger car. We got no compensation, it was taken as a military loss.”

“The Russian soldiers fled from the concentration camp and went along the Zbiroh brook. They stopped many times on their way but were finally caught by the Germans. They had to show where they had stopped and who had given them food. They shot all of them. They came to Mlečice to take Mr Straka. Mr Straka was a friend of my father’s and someone warned him. He fled on his bike and spent several days hiding in the woods. Since he didn’t know what to do, he came to us one night. My dad took him in immediately and said: ‘You stay here.’ He built a kind of a secret cellar – he slept there during the day and in the evening, when we, children, went to sleep, my father and mother took him inside so that he was among people.”

“I worked as an inspector on the assembly, and I sent my application to the secondary engineering school in Kladno. The school sent the application to my workshop for approval, and our foreman, that bastard, certain Venca from Cerhovice, was on a leave at that time. The others therefore said: ´Why should we prevent him from studying, if he is smart enough for it. Let him go study.´ They approved my application and it was sent to Kladno. I got accepted, I began attending the school, and after a month, a notice came that the factory ordered my withdrawal from the school. When that bastard returned from his holiday, he found out that I had begun studying, and he started making inquiries and saying that the decision needed to be reevaluated. I was therefore called back. I went to do the military service from there and when it was over, I went back, but to a different workshop; there were several factories in Hořovice, and up on a hill above Hořovice there was a factory called Cintlovka, which had a foundry and a machining facility. I began working in this workshop and I also found my wife there. After we had married, we moved to the border region, because in Hořovice, I still had the same share of problems because of my past, and it was the same in the army. It was actually a paradoxical situation. After a year in the army, the counterintelligence called on me, urging me to inform upon my fellow soldiers. I told them: ´You really think that I have no honour, even if you see the environment I have come from?´ – ´Well, we count on the education that will transform you.´ – ´I have education, but a decent education, and I will never inform upon my friends!´”

“They arrested my Mom and took her to the commandery which was in the village pub, where they made her sit down and began interrogating her. It was in the evening and they were really ready to shoot her. She was shaking. When she was telling me about it afterwards, she said that telephones were ringing and they began running around and packing everything, and that I allegedly got up and slowly walked outside and went home slowly, and nobody noticed me. She has thus saved her life. The Germans then started running around the village trying to get farmers’ wagons and horses, and my brother and the coachman hid the horse-trappings, and when the soldiers came to our house, they told them: ´Our horse gear is being repaired now, we cannot get the horses ready.´ They eventually found two or three people with horses, and these young boys – Pepík Tahoš and Pepík Cintl, who was my cousin, left with them. They loaded the wagons and at night they left Újezd and headed through Cerhovice towards Zbiroh. The Zbiroh garrison was there, and they didn’t know what to do, there was allegedly some shooting, too, and these boys escaped from the wagons to the forest and they returned home. They have lost their wagons and horses.”

“When I was a year and a half old, my mother went to Hořovice once in a while to do some shopping, and my brother and sister were babysitting me. She was to return at two o’clock in the afternoon, and they walked through the garden to the train stop to meet her there. It had rained before, and the grass was wet, and so we decided to wait for another train. They were waiting there with me and I caught a cold. I got pneumonia, but it was a bad case of thoracic empyema. I grew worse. I was being raised as a milksop, I was born four years after my brother, and my parents had been eagerly expecting my birth, and now I was about to die. My parents to me to the hospital in Beroun. There was no penicillin at that time, and the doctors told them: ´We’ll keep him here for observation.´ When my Dad went there, he said: ´You can take a monkey for you to observe, but not my child.´ A veterinary then came and advised my Dad: ´Take your son from here and bring him to the children’s clinic on Charles Square in Prague.´ I was sick for half a year, and in Prague they introduced a drainage cannula in between my ribs, and my left lung was all purulent and it didn’t work properly. A quarter of a litre of pus was flowing out of my two-year-old body every day. I recovered after half a year. My heart is a bit enlarged, and I could enjoy certain advantages after that, like not having to do general service. But when I began my military service – I was sent there for political reasons, and when I told them about my poor health, I got the reply: ´It is me who orders who is healthy and who will go to work! ´And so I was working with a pickaxe and a spade just like everybody else, and carrying concrete panels, and applying concrete. As I was working out there in the fresh air I became more or less healthy. After my military service was over, they were making fun of me that I had actually become healthy because I had been ordered to do so.”

“My father was a member of the yeomanry, he was very active in the cultural sphere, they were organizing theatre in Újezd, and later he even served as a director for this theatre, and they were playing not only in restaurants, but outside in the open air as well. We went with the theatre show to the gamekeeper’s house, and he was also the firemen’s leader, he was the head of the local Sokol, and he held various other positions. He organized an agricultural drain system there, and they worked on the straightening of the Černý Stream in Lišina, and things like that. He was introducing field drainages, mechanization in agriculture, and all that. When he married, he took my mother’s dowry and instead of furniture he purchased a threshing-machine, and he was using it all over the village and sometimes in other villages as well, he was even going all the way to Točník to help smaller farmers, because there were only few of these threshing-machines. He gave the surplus of the money to my Mom to buy new furniture. Mom used to say: ´He bought me a glass-panelled kitchen cabinet. It was an American cabinet and farmers’ wives from the village were coming to see it and they were saying – oh come, only the ladies from the town can afford such a thing...´”

“The German garrison remained in the village till the very last days. We were naturally listening to the broadcast of London Calling and all that, and on the radio they announced that Germany had capitulated. But Prague was still fighting, and German patrols were walking in the village, but my Dad displayed our flag on the balcony and shouted at them: ´Hitler kaput. Ende, Ende!´ The guards ran to the commandery, and instead of capitulating, their commander and the guard were now running towards our house. Our gate was closed, and Dad was still up there with the flag, and they were kicking into the gate and shouting. Dad jumped into the attic, and they were already on their way upstairs, Dad was running over the hay and they were firing at him from revolvers in the attic. Our house had a hole between the attic and the shed, which was used for throwing hay, and Dad jumped through that hole, ran through the shed and through the barn and the garden. It could have been bad, because there were two other workers and when they heard the shooting, they ran with him. Luckily the Germans didn’t follow them, and these two men went home, and Dad hid in the cellar of one of the houses near the school. These were actually the last days for the German soldiers, and they didn’t know what to do...”