Michal Legdan

* 1939

  • “Jan Vaněk was a great friend of Ferda Fiala, whose family owned a mill. So we got together, but I didn’t see it as some kind of group. Not until after a year. Jan said we’d start an anti-state group. We had what was called a triplet system. We could know three people, and when someone founded another group, then another three. We didn’t know about the others, so we couldn’t tell on them. Jan Vaněk was already pretty clever back then. Just one example. Because he’d trained at the coke plant in Vítkovice, he would often go thirty kilometres from Lichnov on foot, or he’d go by bike. He said we had to be physically strong. We young boys liked that. I took more as some kind of risky game. Jan came up with our group’s name, we were the AMH - the Avengers of Milada Horáková. Horáková was executed about that time. I reckon she might be the only woman worldwide to be executed for politics.”

  • “Then, when they established the cooperative, no one wanted to be the chairman. I remember it as a boy, that it was taken up by one Svrček. He was a big Communist. He only had a croft, and he didn’t understand [farming] much, but because he was a Communist, he was chairman of the cooperative. We felt how things started changing after forty-eight, when the Communists came to power. They didn’t want to speak about it in front of the children because the atmosphere was bad. We had to hand in our butter and buy margarine.”

  • “Priests had even stricter conditions, but even so they received the current news from Czechoslovakia. I don’t know where from, they didn’t tell us, so it wouldn’t be ratted out. Fr Jiří Pustějovský was there too. As I already said, when my mother died, I didn’t fulfil my quota for three days straight. The food was bad enough as it was, and I would’ve received even worse and even less. When the priests found out, they somehow did it to make it like I had fulfilled my quota. I guess Jiří Pustějovský had his hands in it - so I wouldn’t be punished. As I said, I’d requested to be allowed to attend my mother’s funeral. They could escort me, I’d pay for it, I said they could take my money for it. They told me it was out of the question, but they already knew they’d informed me about it ten days after the funeral took place.”

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    Karviná, 03.09.2015

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Among the avengers

Michal Legdan
Michal Legdan
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Michal Legdan was born on 20 June 1939 in the village of Zboj in north-eastern Slovakia as one of ten children of Ondřej and Marie Legdan. His father died when he was three years old. His native region suffered greatly during the war, and so in November 1945 the Catholic Charity organised the transport of some fifteen children from Zboj into foster care in Bohemia and Moravia - including six-year-old Michal and his three years older brother Stanislav. They were taken in by the childless couple Vojtěch and Agnes Tobiáš in Lichnov. During the agricultural collectivisation, the Tobiášes were forced and bullied into joining the local united agricultural cooperative, and Michal Legdan was denied university studies despite successfully passing the entrance exams. In 1956 the witness joined the resistance group Mstitelé Milady Horákové (Avengers of Milada Horáková; a female politician infamously executed by the Communists - trans.), who strived to overthrow the regime. He collected and distributed seditious leaflets, he obtained bullets for the group, as well as new members. However, the leader of the Avengers, Jan Vaněk, also undertook several robberies with alternating members of the group. One of these robberies, undertaken by Jan Vaněk and Miroslav Kašpárek, ended with the death of almost eighty-year-old Jana Maralíková. Michal Legdan had no idea about these activities and he heard about them for the first time when he was placed on trial and sentenced to ten years of prison. He was released by amnesty in 1968. The leader of the group, Jan Vaněk, was hanged at Pankrác Prison on 3 July 1963. After his release Michal Legdan worked in the coal mines in Karviná. He lives in Karviná.