"When the Russians came here in 1968, I also spoke against it in the company, but I couldn't say it. Because when the directors arrived, I was working in the Dačice industrial complex and that was a small business in Suchdol, but we couldn't say that we were against the Russians, in 1968. Even though I know what happened here, in Prague, that there was shooting and so on. Well, we had to...what were we supposed to do... we were, on the one hand, cowards, well, but we probably wouldn't even be able to work there in that company if we made it clear that we were against the Russians. Our manager there said it, it wasn't the director, but the manager only, and soon he left the position of manager and went to work in a locksmith's shop, and then they transffered him to the job position of storekeeper and he had a heart attack and died soon. And it was all a result of him being against the Russians. But we were not allowed to say it, we said it at home, yes, or at work, but the directors from Dačice were not allowed to know. Well, it was a lie upon a lie. I never liked it and neither I liked the association with the Russians. No, I never liked it, but I couldn't say it out loud."
"I may have seen him, not so close, and he went to the forest a lot and people noticed him, and then he was afraid that it might be revealed that he was with us and that they might shoot us. So of his own accord, he told my parents and wanted to leave. He himself, we would have let him, but I was young, I couldn't decide, but my parents would have liked to have him there, but he said: 'No, no, no, it's terribly dangerous for you all.' So my younger sister, she was about seventeen years old, led him through the woods, completely aside, to Třeboň to the train. I wonder if dad went with her before so that she knew where to go, I don't know, we didn't talk about it that much, I just know that Jarmilka, that she led Mr. General Bílí to Třeboň. Well, he probably took the train from Třeboň to České Budějovice, and I don't know if they recognized him there or if he signed up himself."
Miloslava Mráčková, maiden name Brandejsová, was born on January 2, 1935 in the village of Stříbřec u Stráže nad Nežárkou. At the turn of 1939-40, her parents, Josef and Anna Brandejs, hid Josef Bílý in a gamekeeper´s cabin near Stříbřec. He was an army general of the Czechoslovak army and, at the time, the chief commander of the anti-Nazi resistance organization Obrana národa. He went underground in December 1939, and the Brandejs family was probably the first to offer him help. In March 1940, Josef Bílý decided to leave the temporary asylum in the gamekeeper´s cabin so as not to threaten the family with four children with his presence. The Gestapo arrested him in the fall of 1940, and a year later he was executed in the Ruzyně barracks by order of Reinhard Heydrich. In addition to Miloslava Mráčková‘s parents, her older sisters were also privy to the whole matter. The first sister took the letter to Josef Bílý‘s wife in Prague, and the second one secretly transferred him to the railway station in Třeboň. Miloslava graduated from a higher school of economics and after graduation started working as a clerk in a bank. She then worked in similar positions throughout her working career. In 2022, she lived together with her family in Suchdol nad Lužnicí.
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!
