"Daddy was employed at the station with the French. It was in some office where they kept track of where the trains were going. Eventually, Daddy told me, that these Frenchmen, when there was a train with ammunition and munitions, they had some connection and made the train blow up."
"They were in the resistance?"
"Yes, the French. Daddy knew they would blame him as well, so he fled from there. He came to Bohemia on a bumper of a train."
"He hid until the end of the war?"
"He hid in a place convenient for him, and that was Sedmihorky. His grandmother and grandfather had arranged for him to be well hidden in some guesthouse, and it was a very convenient environment for him."
"It was something like when people had experienced the horrors and they had already closed themselves off and didn't want to talk about it. He (my father) basically told me that he hid a lot of people in the bank, behind the counter, you see, when there were merciless shootings outside."
"Nobody fell in there?"
"No, no."
"What do you mean there was shootings? That they were lynchings in the streets? But that was after the war."
"That's what the removal (of Germans) looked like, right. They didn't bother with them much. He arranged some advantage, I don't know what, for the director of the Nový Bor glassworks. And that director wouldn't have even minded the father marrying his daughter. But Daddy already had his Miluše, and he refused. The director then wrote a letter to my brother, after he fled to Germany, about my father. Unfortunately, my brother has the letter, so I at least asked him what it contains. He told me that the letter was about my father's character and that he was completely out of words after reading it."
"My father immediately ran off somewhere and gave me money to buy canned food to stock up. But there was this little shop, there were so many people, there was a queue for several versts ... so I went on the bus, the bus stop was by the slaughterhouse. We were standing there with about five people and a tank came out. There's a slight curve and he failed to make it."
"Is that on Ptácká Street?"
"On Ptácká Street. He didn't turn and he basically sped towards us. We all froze and pressed ourselves against the wall, I can totally see it like it is today, old, young, everyone had that reaction. Luckily the tank then managed to turn and missed us, but it was very unpleasant."
Zuzana Vytlačilová was born as Urbanová on 5 September 1955 in Mladá Boleslav. Her father, Jiří Urban, was deployed by the Nazis to Austria on the railroad for forced labour under German rule. French resistance fighters worked with him there and blew up an ammunition train. My father therefore preferred to escape and hid with the help of his parents in Bohemia until the end of the war. After the war, he helped the displaced Germans in Nový Bor who were hiding from the shooting in the streets. After 1948, my father and his other colleagues from the credit department of the state bank were convicted and imprisoned on trumped-up charges. After his release, he worked in the agricultural administration and had to force peasants from the Mladá Boleslav area to join the JZD (agricultural cooperative led by Communists). During the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Zuzana Vtlačilová narrowly escaped being hit by a tank at a bus stop. After graduating from high school, she attended language school, taught at an elementary school, and worked at Skloexport and at Liaz companies. Her brother emigrated to West Germany, which made it difficult for her to rejoin Skloexport. She then visited her brother in emigration. She married Milan Vytlačil and they had a daughter Anna. In 2023, she lived in Mladá Boleslav.
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!
