František Kusmič

* 1927

  • “There were also Poles. Two of them escaped, but the Russians caught them when they wanted to flee to Finland. They tried to flee across the taiga, and you know, in the taiga, there were those little houses and they took one yeanling there, because they were hungry. And the Russians reported that they lost a kid. And this is how they were caught. They brought them to our camp. In the camp, there was such a well, a dug out in the ground. Inside of that dug out, there was water and these poor guys had to be in that water all the time. They were kept in that hole. Sometimes, they would let them out, but they treated them terribly. They beat them up frequently with a belt. It was terrible, the way the Polish Kapos treated them.”

  • “And so I got there and there were SS units. I said ‘damn it’. I got into some trouble. So we were supposed to exercise and I wasn’t fit enough for it. I had a little heart defect and thus I was brething heavily during the training. Thus they sent me to Vienna, to a very good doctor and he wrote that I was not supposed to be there, at the military training. So I got to Valašské Meziříčí, I was there as a soldier and I got away from the SS.”

  • “Most of us were moved to Huzová. They moved us in 1948, in August. They came and we didn’t have to move a thing as they brought some prisoners from Mikulov and they loaded everything on the trucks. I was well acquainted with a local policeman and he was with me on my yard. And I told him: ‘I’ll take the manure as well. And those bushes, as they are’. I said I’d take everything. And he said: ‘Franta, don’t fool around, you’ll have enough wood there’. ‘But it’s mine.”

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    Uničov, 12.10.2014

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I’ll take the manure as well. And those bushes, as they are

František Kusmič
František Kusmič
zdroj: Pamět národa - Archiv

František Kusmič was born in 1927 in Nový Přerov. His father‘s name was Matěj Kusmič, his mother‘s Kateřina, née Slunská. He also had an older sister Marie and a brother Matěj. As a seventeen-year-old adolescent, in December 1944, he was called into service to the German army. The military was stationed for training in the Wiener Neustadt, then moved to fight at the Czech-Slovak border. In April 1945, he was captured by the Red Army and as a prisoner of war, he was sent to Russia, where he spent the following year in captivity. In 1946, he returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Kuřim, where he at first worked in a factory and then to at a farm. In the autumn 1946, he returned to his original home in Nový Přerov. He had to leave again in August 1948, when his family was deported to the formerly German settlement of Huzová. As he worked as a saddler in the Uničov sugar factory, he managed to move with his family to Uničov, where he still lives today.