"The Russian executed theirs. Some of the members of our group were on a mission somewhere. They were five or six men. It was at the Milík cabin, where we had our encampment. When they came back from action, one of them complained to the commander that they had behaved in a cowardly way. So Andrej sentenced all of them to death. They hanged them behind that Milíkov. I still remember one of them hanging there."
"I was a liaison and I walked up to the guard. I didn't know that he wasn't one of us but a member of Vlasov's army instead. It was dark and he spoke Russian, so I took him for a partisan. We walked with him – me, him and one more guy. I didn't know that he was pointing a gun at me. I turned around and he used that opportunity and fired at me. The other guy ran away, leaving me there."
"Slávek, my cousin, was sentenced to death and was being transported to a concentration camp through Brno. In Brno, the train stopped and they were allowed to get out of it. At the same time, there stopped a train carrying inmates from a labor camp in Mladkov. My cousin intermingled with the boys from the labor-camp train. He took somebody's jacket and put it on himself. He had some dark pants and he marched together with the boys to the labor camp in Brno, from where he was able to escape. That wasn't so hard, because it was just a labor camp, not a concentration camp."
"I remember the liberation in Hvozd. I saw the first Russian tank rolling on the street. I think I might have seen Brezhnev in Hvozd at the time when the Russians arrived there. It was a rather thick officer walking around the place, I think he might have been waiting for a telegram. He was rather corpulent, wearing a long army coat – it was an officers' coat, made of leather. I believe it was him because the inhabitants of the nearby villages – Svitavy, Litomyšl or Polička – they remember that Brezhnev was here at that time. I'm sure it was Brezhnev. He was in the camp that the Russians set up behind Svitavy. After the war, they found out that he had travelled through this region. That's how I came to the conclusion that it was him, that I had seen Brezhnev."
"When I was a kid, I knew how to make some extra money. I bought blueberries from the other kids and then re-sold them in Haná. I had to walk to from Hvozd to Haná – it was quite a long walk. I made around five crowns on the berries, which is some thirty crowns in today's money. The way to Haná would take quite a while. I walked through the forest, through Modrá hvězda. I think that the forest might have been some five kilometers wide. I came out from the forest and then I saw the rolling hills sweeping all the way down to Haná in Loučka."
Antonín Zapletal was born in 1923 in Hvozd. A lot of the inhabitants from this small Moravian village located near Konice got involved in the resistance movement during the war. Among them were several members of the family of Jaroslav Zapletal. The cousin of Jaroslav Zapletal was the leader of the 3rd district of Konice in the Federation of the Czechoslovak Youth and was sentenced to death after his arrest. However, he managed to escape from the cattle car during the transport of the prisoners to a concentration camp. He then went into hiding in Ludmírov for the remainder of the war. Antonín‘s uncle Břetislav Zapletal was executed in Mírov shortly before the end of the war. Antonín‘s parents supported the partisans of the Jermak-Fursenko troop and Antonín himself joined the troop in the early months of 1945. He remained in the troop until he was wounded by a bullet fired by a member of the so-called „Vlasov“ army. He spent the rest of the war hiding and recovering at home. After the war, he moved to Moravská Třebová, where he was given a shop that had been expropriated from its former German owners. However, the shop was nationalized in 1948 and acquired by the Jednota. Antonín had lived in Moravská Třebová until his death.
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!
