“But in 1952, in the spring, he suffered a stroke. He recovered, only had a speech problem but even this improved. His arm was weaker. And it was in this condition, about two months after the accident, he received a letter from the municipality that they had to move, within a fortnight, from Prague to a place in the Chomutov region. I think it was Kovářská, so they wanted to check it. It was an empty house, abandoned and derelict, left by the Germans. In his condition, he would have certainly died there. This was a campaign in which the uncomfortable pensioners were moved from Prague, it even had a name, I think. Well, pensioners were to leave Prague. So for everything he did, Prague moved Engliš out of his own villa.”
“Imagine that everybody had a little card and on that card there was a Roman number, a star or nothing. The Roman number meant this: number one a person from a labourer’s family, number two from a farm labourer’s family, three that one’s father was a master or a foreman, four a clerk, five a university educated person, such as a lawyer or a doctor, six a person from a small family business, seven a person from a family of a factory-owner. If you had one, you were accepted even if you failed to pass the entrance exams. If you had seven, you were not accepted even if you fared excellently. A star meant a Communist Party membership and this was two levels up. This is how it worked. I sat in the committee but we did not decide anything, we only asked questions. The choice was made by the HR staff.”
“There were forty-eight injured in Liberec, nine dead. From the first wave of people, I remember a nurse named Livečková, who underwent a surgery. She worked in the hospital. She walked to work and was shot in her neck. She died too. I remember these names, you remember them till your death. The forty-eight injured lay in the operating theatres, in corridors, or even just on the floor. Those whose hands and arms were shot through waited patiently. There was this huge solidarity. No one grumbled, everybody understood the situation. Later, people from Děčín told me that nothing happened there. That people took stores by the storm and bought flour and salt, fearing for the war to come. This was not the case in Liberec, there many people were really injured or killed.”
František Plhoň was born on January 27, 1941, in Prague. He is the grandson of the politician and scientist Karel Engliš, with whom he spent a lot of time as a young boy. After the communist coup Karel Engliš was moved from Prague and a part of his family was imprisoned. He studied medicine at the Charles University and then took up the job of a doctor in a hospital in Jablonec nad Nisou, then in Liberec. It was where he witnessed the occupation by the Soviet Army. He treated many Liberec citizens injured by the Soviet soldiers. He also worked as a sport doctor and contributed to the building of paramedics service in Jablonec. His career as a doctor was made difficult as he refused to enter the Communist Party. Despite this, however, and thanks to his expert knowledge he became the general consultant at the Department of Otolaryngology in Děčín. He served on this post until 1997.
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