Pavel Dostál

* 1949

  • It was April 3. At the brother's house we planted potatoes, my wife and children were there also with me. Pavlínka was six years old and Tomášek was less than four and they went home earlier. I was still finishing it there, it gets dark around eight o'clock in April. So they went home. As we finished, I came home. I couldn't unlock the door, I said to myself, what's going on? Then I succeeded and found them right outside the entrance. Everything tossed in the living room, a toilet full of vomit, because he drank some liquor that was in the bar. Tomášek and Věra, they were beaten with a hammer on the spot, and Pavlinka, who died within 3 days on the April 6. They tried to save her, but they did not succeed. "

  • "I actually saw him in Olomouc at that investigator. If it was able to get hold of him, I'd probably strangle him there, somehow in the hallway. They were hungry, he went after food. But when he went after the meal, he didn't have to kill. So he picked it up here, then picked up all the keys to every door, locked it, I don't know what, he stole watches, knocked out everything. "

  • At that time, it was sometime in the spring, we were working in the school garden. At that time, the Michurin nurseries, as it were, taught us how to grow vegetables and trees, following the example of Michurin. So we were in that garden, now the tatraplan came, because our leader was a communist and party chairman in Břuchotín. So they loaded him, two tatraplans, he was guarded by his wife. Then they came again, and as I came home from school, my mother says, 'Dad was taken away.'

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    Břuchotín, 31.07.2021

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I dreamed of a future, and in a moment, it was all gone

Pavel Dostál in 1988
Pavel Dostál in 1988
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Pavel Dostál was born on June 10, 1949 into an agricultural family as the sixth child of Maria and Stanislav Dostál. After the confiscation of the agricultural machines and the violent collectivization of their property, his father Stanislav was sentenced in 1959 to two and a half years in prison for sedition. After returning thanks to the amnesty, he died tragically on the last day of 1961. Pavel Dostál trained as an agricultural machinery repairman and worked all his life at the Křelov-Břuchotín collective farm in the Olomouc region. After completing his basic military service, he married Věra Vaňková in 1972 and they had two children, a daughter Pavlína (1974) and a son Tomáš (1977). In April 1981, his life changed fundamentally. On his return from the field, his wife Věra interrupted an escaped Soviet soldier in their house, who stole from them and brutally murdered both young children and Vera. The murderer Yuri Nikolayevich Kononov was later convicted and probably executed in the Soviet Union. The case was taken over by the Soviet army from the very beginning and, in cooperation with Czechoslovak STB, they tried to keep it secret. Pavel Dostál overcame the most difficult moments of his life thanks to his family, friends and work. In 1986 he married a second time to Věra Kolínská, together they raised her son Ivo (1981) and two other sons were born to them: Jan (1988) and Petr (1990). He only watched the Velvet Revolution on television because he was recovering from an operation of hernia. Later, together with the siblings, he arranged his father‘s rehabilitation. He likes to travel around the world, take care of the house and farm. In 2021 he lived with his wife in a family house in Křelov-Břuchotín.