Antonín Brázdil

* 1942

  • "I arrived home from hospital on 12 November 1961 or so. About three days later I got my draft order. I consulted my mother. She said it was impossible; I couldn't go to the army. I was as thin as a stick, like a slat. She said, 'Go report it to the military authority.' The head physician also said my service should be deferred for a year or two. But it wasn't. The head physician told the district sanitary officer in Nový Jičín about my condition. I remember his name was Blažek. He was supposed to arrange with the military authority that, as a possible infection carrier, I should not enlist. It was dangerous too. He didn't bother to. I came to the military authority to give back my draft order because I would be regarded as a deserter if I didn't, and told the officer I could not enlist. He said there was nothing he could do about it; the draft lists had been confirmed and sent to the Ministry of National Defence. I asked what I should do. He told me to enlist, believing the military doctor would certainly send me home right away. So I did. I enlisted in Znojmo and that very day there was a medical examination. The doctor had no record of my illness, and of course he thought I was a malingerer. He thought I merely hated the idea of being in the army and was just looking for a way out."

  • "During the coup, we didn't work for two days. We didn't know what was going to happen, if there was going to be a war or what. There were tanks everywhere. The tank repair shop was surrounded by Russian tanks, plus the artillery pointed their gun carriages right at the plant. It didn't feel good. A Russian lieutenant came to the gatehouse. There was a heavy armored gate that moved electrically, and the commander had a tank that was in for a repair and was in reserve parked within the gate widthwise, so the entrance was impassable. But the Russians found a way in. They drove a tank into the concrete fence, knocked it down, and they were in."

  • "We woke up to an old lady running down the street shouting, 'People, wake up, there's a war on!' I thought the lady was crazy. I didn't have the TV or radio on, I didn't know anything. And they (the Warsaw Pact soldiers) had already come from Poland to us, via Těšín and Ostrava. I turned on the television and they told us to wait for a special report. By then, I was thinking that maybe it wasn't the lady who had gone crazy. I listened to the news and didn't get to sleep again. My wife started staggering and said we should go to the maternity ward. We got dressed and went out. It was about four in the morning when we left the house. It was impossible to cross the road. There were APCs roaring all around us."

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I didn‘t know I was born in Germany until I was 15

Antonín Brázdil, 1961
Antonín Brázdil, 1961
zdroj: Archive of Antonín Brázdil

Antonín Brázdil was born on 27 April 1942 in Germany during the Second World War. His Czech parents went to Mülheim in the Ruhr area in 1939 to work voluntarily. His mother and children returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. The father came home in the autumn of 1945. After the war, the family lived in semi-solitude in Wallachia. Around 1955 they moved to Nový Jičín. Until the age of fifteen, the witness did not know that he was born in Germany. He was trained as a locksmith in Příbor and graduated from the industrial school in Kopřivnice in the evening. He worked in an engine repair shop and in the development department of the Tatra car factory in Kopřivnice. His father Antonín Brázdil died tragically in 1960. A year later, he contracted a severe form of typhoid fever. Shortly after his discharge from hospital he was conscripted into the army. He suffered from bullying in the reception centre in Rajhrad. In August 1968, he experienced how Soviet tanks surrounded a military repair facility in the Šenov section of Nový Jičín. From 1970 he worked as an auto mechanic for a Slovak agricultural cooperative. After 1989, he opened an auto repair shop in Nový Jičín.