“I passed the examination for the Czech grammar school in Khust. The turning point for us occurred on March 15, 1939, with the entry of Hitler’s army to the Czechoslovak territory. Slovakia separated and Hungarians forcibly returned to Carpathian Ruthenia after they had received Hitler’s permission to occupy Carpathian Ruthenia. We received news from our army that we were to report within one hour with our suitcases in the military command, because a deportation of the army together with Czech civilians was underway. We packed our things and we walked to the military command, which was about a twenty minutes walk. A new republic was temporarily declared in Ukraine and so there was continual shooting. We encountered an enemy guard at one of the intersections. They stopped us and they threatened that they would shoot us. We begged them to let us go. We had to go back home and we got to the sector which was occupied by Hungarians.”
“We did not receive a single drop, nothing. Nnobody told us anything, there were about eight of us in the train compartment. At three o’clock at night we arrived to Munich. We stopped and as we were stepping out of the train car, hungry, tired, nervous, and tearful, we saw a lighted camp and barb wire. We knew everything about Hitler from school and we knew too well that the concentration camp Dachau was near Munich. As we were getting off, I thought that we were there. I got a panic attack and I was scared. I only saw barb wire and firing positions. It was not Dachau, it was the Karlsfeld camp and the BMW factory was on the opposite side. We knew that we were going there.”
“1948 was a turning point. There were purges and screenings at universities. My thinking was leftist and I was a member of the Party. I lived in Třebíč in the proletarian milieu where there were poor Třebíč families who were mostly employed in the shoe-making factory in Borovina, which had about 4500 employees. I was going there, and they knew me and my mom and our whole family. I was watching it [in the 1950s] and I thought it strange. Then there were other court trials which hit the leading Party officials as well, such as Šling in Brno, and they were all executed. Obviously, this interested me and I was disturbed by it.”
Miloš Chmelíček was born on May 28, 1924 in Nárameč in the Třebíč district. He grew up in a family with four children. His father served in the Czechoslovak police. Due to his job transfer the family had to relocate to Carpathian Ruthenia, where their father died shortly after. The Chmelíček family suffered another blow on March 15, 1939 when the Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. With Hitler‘s permission, Hungarians forcibly returned to Carpathian Ruthenia. It was only after great difficulties that the Chmelíček family managed to return to the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. After graduation from grammar school in Třebíč in 1943 Miloš was sent to do forced labour (Totaleinsatz). At first he worked in Třebíč and from January 1944 in Munich, where he also experienced the most devastating bombing of the city. After the war he focused on the study of medicine. Due to the poverty which he had witnessed in Carpathian Ruthenia as well as in the Třebíč region, he sympathized with the political left and in spite of certain disillusion from the actions of the political regime after 1948 he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party. He devoted his entire life to the medical profession. He deserves special credit for the development of the hospital in Třebíč. In the 1970s he was awarded a state decoration for merit, and for his lifelong activities he also received an award from the city of Třebíč in 2014 and from the Vvsočina Region two years later.
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