“I served as a messenger for one illegal group, and their leader was from Mistřín and as I was going to the train station when I went to Brno, I would wait there and go to the train station in Svatobořice. And the political leader of that group from Zlín…the Brno group, our vanguard… gave me a letter for this Mečl. For this man from the Zlín group. I gave it to him personally and he said: ‘We will discuss it tomorrow, we have our meeting.’ But some people from that circle went to the drugstore owner Hájek and as they came there, they were being arrested one by one by the Gestapo. And this Mečl, I don’t know, if they found the letter in his hands or not… Now I was in a situation that if I went to work, they would summon me to the office and that would be my end. They would imprison me in the Kounice Halls.” – “And how many times did you deliver messages like this?” – “About two or three times.” – “And you knew what was in that letter or what it was about?” – “This Mečl briefly told me that they had an armed group in Zlín, but that they were only armed with hand weapons. Eight hundred people, and that they were about to face a German group. They were arrested, 270 persons were arrested in Zlín. I only served as a messenger. If they had tortured Mečl and made him confess from whom he had the messages, they could have just officially ordered me to come to the office in the Zbrojovka factory and have me arrested. I was scared and so I did not go to the Zbrojovka factory anymore.”
“The Warsaw Pact armies were liberating us and I was at home by myself. Vladimír was in the children’s room and I was in the bedroom. He came to me and said: ‘Dad, they are calling you from the screw-mill.’ I picked up the phone and the commander of the factory’s security guards was on the line. I was his superior; I don’t even know how it happened. He told me: ‘Oldřich, turn on the radio.’ I thus started listening to the broadcast and I was on the phone at the same time. ‘Well, but what shall we do? What can we do? There are armed soldiers here, and Russia has three million persons in their army. So what are we able to do?’ But the director Dub was only temporarily there, and he ordered us to take turns listening to the radio broadcast. Somebody had to be by the radio all the time and record what they were announcing. The radio informed that based on a certain agreement, the armies of the Warsaw Pact were now occupying Czechoslovakia. Well and then I went there and I fell asleep. And he came to me again after a while and he said that we should send some guards somewhere. They were passing through Kyjov and there were tanks all the way from Trenčín to Slavkov.”
“It was after my father had been seriously wounded and transported to the army hospital in Skalica in Slovakia, because the hospital in Kyjov was still occupied by Germans. We were trying to get some stretcher for him, and I didn’t know what to do. As I looked around, there was certain Mr. Zborovský and he was carrying my father in his arms to that basement. We put him on a stretcher there and my friend had a van hidden in a haystack, he had driven it home from Brno in order to escape the war front. They gave him blood transfusion and they gave us a document, the size A4 or A5 with a diagonal red stripe over it. And they told us that we were not to allow anyone to stop us and to take the car from us. And so we went. We waited in a line in Hodonín in front of the district administration office, but only for a while. When the girl who was directing the traffic there, - there were three lanes of vehicles coming from Rohatec, tanks, cannons, ox-driven wagons pulling cannons... well, the girl raised a flag and she gave us the right of way over all the others. I arrived to Skalica, we found out where the hospital was and we dove there, but the doctors there told us: ‘Well, but we have no electricity, it will only be turned on tomorrow.’ But they let him lie on the operation table there. I asked the doctor if he knew where Mr. Kosík, a professor from the Skalica hospital, lived. He came from Svatobořice and he knew my father, and just as he heard the news that my father was seriously wounded, he allowed me to spend the night in his house. I spent the night here and then I went there and Mr. Kosík later told me: ‘I spoke with him in the morning.’ And he was dead. He has not survived, because inside his body it was all severely damaged.”
Oldřich Krejčí was born on May 6, 1914 in Svatobořice near Kyjov. He had three siblings. In 1920 he began studying at an elementary school, and later he attended the higher elementary school in Kyjov. After completing the school he began his vocational training and until 1929 he worked in the company Zbrojovka Brno. He began his military service in 1936, he was drafted to the armoured vehicles regiment and he served until March 1939. During WWII he joined the illegal resistance movement as a messenger and he was involved in activities of Slovácké Krúžky (Moravian Slovakia Circles) in Brno and Zlín. After the end of the war he went to work to Prague, where he began participating in the activities of the circle, he exercised in the Sokol organization and he met his wife-to-be Věra. They married in 1949 in the Old Town Hall in Prague. A construction of a large screw-mill factory was planned in Kyjov in 1950, and Oldřich therefore returned to his native region. He eventually advanced in his career and became an independent investment manager, while his wife worked as a teacher of civil defence education. In 1968 he signed a protest document against the entry of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia. Since he later refused to withdraw his signature, he was demoted to a lower position at work and in 1974 he was fired immediately after reaching the retirement age. Oldřich Krejčí was the oldest citizen of Kyjov. He passed away on October, the 21st, 2018
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!
