“The revolt had been on the fifth of May, and now it was June, everyone was coming home, but not Dad. We listened to the radio, and the announcer for the evening was one F. K. Zeman, and he read names. Say: there’s a camp of Czechs in Berlin, it’s managed by so and so, and they’re waiting for transport. And he read the names of the people that were there. One day he was reading the names, we weren’t even listening properly, and suddenly - Hofta. Hofta’s there, in Schwerin! There was a big barracks there with Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Danes, and so on, these people were collected there and waiting for transport. The Americans were feeding them. That was occupied by the Americans back then, before they gave it to the Russians for a piece of Berlin. So there were some eighteen people there back then, they read their names. The evening that they read it out, then the very next day I set off to the radio house to see that Mr Zeman, and there was some man with him there, some university teacher, what was his name... He was with [exiled Czechoslovak president] Beneš in London, and then he was bigwig in the National Socialist Party, what was [he called]... I’ve got it written down in my memoirs. He said: ‘You want to go there to get your dad? I’ll get you a car, my daughter’s there, she was in a concentration camp too, and they gathered them all up in Schwerin...”
“We drove into the courtyard of the... and the prisoners were already standing there ready, poor things, because the radio had announced that we were coming for them. And my Dad was at the front, he always took the initiative... he was quite the speaker, and it seems he was something of a judge for them, or what... And so he came rushing out from among the crowd of those eighteen people that were there, he rushed out and leapt [into my arms]. I couldn’t recognise him, I lifted him up like this, I was a boy of twenty one... wait, not twenty one... well, it was in 1945, I lifted him up, he weighed forty kilos, the poor chap. I lifted him up like this - you’re my dad, gosh you’ve lost weight! I hugged him like this, then they led us inside, they had food ready for us, everything, and they had three rooms there, one was for the women, then it was men, and men again, I slept with him in his bed up top, and all through the night he told me about the concentration camp, he was full of the experience, and the others started saying: ‘Quiet already, we want to sleep,’ and he kept whispering something into my ear, how things were in the concentration camp, and he was a bit deranged at the time, you understand, suddenly he was a free man...”
Dalibor Hofta was born on 12 October 1924 in Říčany near Prague. His father Jindřich Hofta was a skilled carpenter. After returning from Yugoslavia, where he had stayed after seeing combat in Italy, Jindřich Hofta founded a carpenter‘s shop in Říčany. When Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Germans, the father contacted a resistance group that published the illegal magazine V boj (To Fight) In 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and based on his sentence he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he met with the future Czechoslovak president Antonín Zápotocký. His son Dalibor was drafted to forced labour in Schweinfurt, which produced ball bearings for Messerschmitts, among other things. In August 1943 the Allies carried out a devastating air raid on this strategically important city. In the ensuing confusion, Dalibor Hofta and other colleague from the forced labour escaped and set out on a dramatic, but ultimately successful journey to Prague. While there, a courageous acquaintance from Sokol helped him dupe the Employment Office and obtain employment in Bohemia, in fact in the nearby town of Měcholupy - where he produced ball bearings again. In March 1945 he decided to marry his girlfriend. But because he was not yet of age, he attempted to visit his father, who could authorise their marriage with his signature. However, the Nazi official he approached with the proposal was so enraged by Dalibor’s „audacity“ that he gave him a heavy blow to the head. This gave cause to a very severe neurological illness in later years, which left his face deformed, his eyesight and hearing damaged, and himself suffering from further problems of neurological origin. In June 1945 he heard from the radio that a group of Czech prisoners from a death march, which included his father, was lodging in Schwerin. With the considerable help of Prof. Vladimír Krajina, he organised an expedition through the ruins of Germany, and after being happily reunited with his father, the whole group was taken back to their homeland. After recovering from concentration camp his father renewed his political activities in the National Socialist Party. In 1946 his father was re-elected mayor, and he remained in that function until February 1948. His father was arrested in 1952 for „undesirable political activities“. He was released after three months, probably due to a letter his son Dalibor wrote to Antonín Zápotocký. Dalibor Hofta continued in his father‘s footsteps and became an active and selfless citizen. His public activities made him an important citizen of the town of Říčany. Dalibor Hofta passed away on August, the 5th., 2016
Neobyčejní občané, aneb Postavy z říčanských ulic a domů
autor:
Dalibor Hofta
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