Zdeněk Hejmala

* 1924

  • "The whole group, when I said I wasn't going to work [on Easter Monday], they didn't go either. On Tuesday the manager called them in and found out that I was the organiser of the strike. He didn't give them pay and they had to make up the two days. He wanted to send me to a concentration camp, but Maruška [a secretary] saved me. She was crying and begging him. So he didn't send me to the concentration camp, but from the next day he sent me to the underground workshops in Vrahovice near Prostějov, where parts for the V-1 and V-2 were being made."

  • "And I showed him [my friend] where I worked, the hall by the cemetery. And when we were about a third of the way through, several SS members appeared. They surrounded us and started asking us what we were doing there. I told them that I had worked there and who the manager had been then. They believed me. But they wanted to know what my friend, Ota Fikejs, had been doing. I told them that he didn't speak German, and because I knew all the managers, I convinced them that Ota also had worked there. So they didn't liquidate us. In the evening, this group then put two bombs in each machine, which completely destroyed the entire hall, including the electrical substation, the kitchen and the machines."

  • "The revolution in 1989 was very gentle. On the one hand, this is good, but it was so gentle that it left everyone free, even those who deserved to be punished. There are many members of the murderous Communist Party and the People's Militia everywhere in society and in some state organs, including the government, the Senate, the army and the police, among the directors of factories and health facilities, just everywhere. We support the citizens, politicians and people who seeked power in the time of communist lawlessness and totalitarianism. They still desire personal power and well-paid state positions."

  • "On the third of September, State Security arrested Podsedník, the mayor of Brno and chairman of the National Socialist Party. It took them time to find out the other members of the Provincial Committee of the National Socialists. It was not until two months later that they arrested another member, my good friend Jaroslav Břicháček. Secret police broke into the central secretariat of the National Socialist Party in Prague. They took all the files and archives there. When Podsedník and Břicháček found out about this, they called me and told me to come to the central secretariat in Brno that very day, that they would prepare the Brno lists for me. I came there and hid eight volumes in our house in Česká."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Kuřim, 04.12.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 02:51:46
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Brno, 26.05.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:47:45
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

To be a decent person, to take care of family and to bid farewell to those who are passing away to eternity

Zdeněk Hejmala, graduation photo, 1945
Zdeněk Hejmala, graduation photo, 1945
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Zdeněk Hejmala was born on 6 December 1924 in Česká near Brno. Together with his brother they became orphans very early, his parents died in 1935 and 1938. During the World War II he was forced to work in the Kuřim branch of a German company. He came into conflict with the Gestapo and was threatened with transfer to a concentration camp. Thanks to his grandparents´ and family´s support, he graduated from a secondary technical school. After the war he became involved in the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party in Moravia. Together with other party members, he says to have helped many people to emigrate from totalitarian Czechoslovakia after February 1948. Although State Security did not discover his connection with the illegal group Rozvodněná Dyje (Swollen Dyje), which activities have been overlooked up to now, he was described as a politically unreliable person in his cadre materials. Despite having good study capacities, the regime never allowed him to study at university.