“I remember the air raids. (The town itself was not bombed – ed.’s note). There were rather air attacks at the railroad. There was a railroad there, and the ground attack airplanes followed it all the time and sometimes they shot locomotives to pieces. There was a meander of the Elbe River and the trains rode very close to the river. The ground attack airplanes had an easy work, they just followed the railroad and they destroyed many trains there. I think that no civilians were killed there. I remember that we had boats and we were boating on the Elbe. That was stupid. The ground attack planes approached and we were waving at them. He would always fly over us, then start circling around us and fly away. We still didn’t know why. Only when we got quite far away, he approached the place again and only then he blasted the transport to pieces.”
“Unfortunately it did not turn out well. When they bombed out the guardhouses during some air raids in Kolín, people managed to steal some machine guns. These machine guns and other weapons from the destroyed buildings were carried by a firefighter truck to a fire station. What happened was that somehow it became discovered and Bilinger was then executed.”
“The Russians then arrived. That was worse... Raping and stealing. Altogether fifty Russians died here, but they shot each other among themselves. There was no fighting here.”
František Žák was born September 25, 1929 in Prague-Žižkov. His maternal grandfather worked in Prague as the director of a technical services company. When he was five years old, František moved with his parents to Týnec nad Labem, where his father started a trade. František attended an elementary school there. After completing school, he worked in his father‘s workshop and he learnt the trade of a plumber and boilerman. In 1949 communists did not allow him to study at a secondary school in Hradec Králové. In 1951-1953 he served in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions near Most. After his military service František worked in the Water Management Company and then he was forced to work in a manganese mine in Chvaletice. He retired in 1980 and at present he and his wife live in Týnec nad Labem.
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!
