František Janáček

* 1935

  • "They took my mother and grandfather to the forest. We were left alone in the kitchen and sat with my brother, and one of the Germans began to discreetly ask questions and investigate the situation. Now he was asking questions and I, because my mother cajoled me before, kept consistently answering negatively. I denied all contact with the partisans, even though we had had it and it was quite experienced. He sat us on a stool by the stove, I sat on the left, my brother on the right. The German directed questions at us and I was the only one to answer. He thought that my brother – his other victim might also say something as he might have been more broken. So, he turned his attention to him and asked something. The brother was already breathing to say something and I dug him in the side with my right elbow, to keep quiet, and warned him that he probably couldn't and would leave it to me. At that blow, the German hit me with his right hand on the left cheek. It was a terrible pain for me at the time, I had never experienced such a blow before. But he shouldn't have done that. Because I started yelling and my brother could hardly understand, so he started yelling too. The German didn't get a word from us after that. But if I remember it even after many years, actually almost eighty years later, it was the most powerful experience of my life. Nothing like this ever happened again."

  • "They turned, came to the yard, got a Stand at ease and rushed to the gamekeeper´s cottage, in a group of three or four. The guys also pierced the duvets. They crawled under the bed, strewed hay on the floor without any remains, manure in the barn, threw away potatoes, straw in the barn, hay in the barn. There was wood in the shed, they were throwing all the wood chips around and looking for any remnants of the partisans. But it was Zarevo, they didn't leave anything behind. The whole group of fifty people who turned the cottage inside out and almost climbed into the chimney, they found nothing at all."

  • "Mom came in the afternoon, we listened to her and found out that she was trying to push us away and talk in such a way that we wouldn't know what she was talking about with grandpa and grandma. The more we wanted to know all and find out the core of the matter. We didn't succeed on the first day. However, when my mother came the next day, my grandfather told us that they were going home to the gamekeeper´s cottage, but that there were gendarmes with us and we had to be quiet and not say anything anywhere. Because otherwise the Germans would have shot my father and mother and probably us too. So, they also got us interested in it. The next day in the evening, grandpa led us to the cottage. We went to see grandpa and my brother and I raced how we would be heroes in front of the gendarmes when we were at home. But when we came around the fence to the gate, the Russian man, who was on guard, opened the gate, got up and we got scared. We lost our minds and we were glad to be alive."

  • "So, on the 20th or the 19th (of December) they received an order from Kiev, that on the evening of the 22nd, a train with tanks would go from Pilsen via Pardubice to the Russian front. So that they would blow it up, namely on the bridge over the Elbe near Přelouč. Such a detail had Kyiv. And he knew it, he told the commander, so he sent a group of six and they were his original ones, about three, and three were from the prisoners who joined them there. Because the commander's name was Pukin, but I didn't see him, I only found out later, we didn't see them, they were already gone, they were already away. I know that they said that later. My father led them to the village of Sloupno, it's there below Ždírc, along the Doubrava, where the Železné hory are. So, the partisans, because it was easy, the route, so they went along the edge of the Železné hory, they couldn't get lost there, until they came to that Přelouč. They had machine guns and carried fifteen kilos of explosives with them, which they were supposed to place on that bridge. And until that train hits it, so that it bangs. Unfortunately, it didn't happen."

  • "On December 18, 1944, a group of Russian partisans came to our cottage in the morning. There were seventeen of them. They were between eighteen and forty years old. So, the guys were in their boom, strong, but they walked, they had a twenty-five kilometer march through the snow. No footpath, no road, straight across the field. This was a group of Soviet soldiers who were selected to help the Slovak National Uprising and were dropped off at Tri Duby Airport near Sliač pod Banská Bystrica, there was an airport there. And they still in that October, normally there the plane landed, they didn't jump with parachutes, the plane landed, they got out. And they were supposed to help with the Slovak national uprising, but when they went there for a day, two days, and the commander saw it, his name was Fausto, they called him, and he was a captain of the Russian army. That's how he found out that the uprising was actually over, that the overwhelming force of Germans that surged in from Hungary, from the west of Slovakia, from the north from Poland, was so huge that the insurgents, there were probably several thousand of them, were forced to flee to Malé Fatry and climb into those hills in the Tatras to disappear from the eyes of the Germans. And they couldn't really do anything anymore. He came to this conclusion. And they were equipped, they had a radio, a walkie-talkie, and a radio to receive messages, so they called to Kiev, there was the headquarters of the partisan war, what to do. So, they told them: "Go to Czech." On foot, they couldn't drop off a car for them, but they told them: "You have to go through Kysuce to Poland and at Jablunkov you will cross from Poland to Moravia." Because the border from Jablunkov to the south between Moravia and Slovakia is heavily defended, and you wouldn't be able to pass there."

  • "I remember that from Slavětín, those four years, the first four years of my life, I remember, for example, when the Germans came. On the fifteenth, they arrived around the sixteenth of March 1939. I was not yet four years old, but I remember that you could see from the window of the gamekeeper´s cottage, there were about two houses across the road, and they were standing there with those trucks, jumping out of those cars. I don't know how many there were, I couldn't find out. But they dispersed among the houses, and because each house was heated, maybe the men were in the forest, as I said, the general part, but the women were at home, waiting for the children to come from school, cooking, or had small children at home. And I remember that they also came to us, there were probably five or six of those Germans. But they behaved quite calmly."

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When he was nine a German slapped him. But he didn‘t even peep about the partisans

František Janáček
František Janáček
zdroj: archive of the witness

František Janáček was born on June 9, 1935 in Havlíčková Borová, he started attending elementary school in 1941 in nearby Peršíkov village. He comes from a family of foresters, his grandfather and later his father worked as gamekeepers. He was only four years old when the German soldiers arrived in March 1939, but he still remembers that moment. In December 1944, Soviet partisans came to their gamekeeper´s cabin. The family hosted them for some time, helped them, supplied them with supplies, or treated them. It was a group of Zarevo partisans with headquarters in Kyiv, which was originally supposed to help the Slovak National Uprising. Because of helping the partisans, the family was interrogated by gendarmes and František‘s father was imprisoned by the Gestapo. In 1950, František passed the entrance exams to the forestry school in Písek, but was not accepted for political reasons. He worked as a gamekeeper in Hluboká near Krucemburk. In the 1960s, he graduated from a distance forestry school in Trutnov. In 2022 he lived in Hluboká near Krucemburk.