František Svoboda

* 1930

  • "An investigation followed. A Protectorate gendarme in uniform was walking down the street with a gun. These were the Mausers with the bayonet, and with him walked a man in a leather coat and a black hat. Suddenly these men appeared in the kitchen. My father didn't know any of them, but they were quite vigorous. They put a paper with photographs in front of my father. There was a bicycle, a briefcase, and several other artifacts. The German asked the father if he knew any of the objects. But that was not all. At that time my grandfather was tanning calfskins behind the cottage. From a calf that one of our friends had knocked off the ground. And leather was in short supply in the war. My grandfather didn't know what was going on in our country at the time. But the Gestapo just wanted to look at the attic. My father went with them and came back white as a sheet. They said the Germans were poking the hay with a bayonet to see if anyone was hiding there. "

  • "Field actions were almost the order of the day. These were already operations that grossly endangered any organized activity of the Germans. For example, a train came out of the station on the old line and by the time it reached Hamry, which is about three kilometres away, it was already off the track. All it took was for someone to loosen the bolts. When the train hit it, usually it was on a curve, the axle pushed the rail and it was derailed. That was all the time. These were really guerrilla actions."

  • "Suddenly I look out of the garden towards Žďár Castle and see a black plume of smoke. I thought: what is this? It looked like a sawmill on fire. And I thought of something stupid. I picked myself up and went to look. The lesson soon came. When I ran about five hundred meters, I came to a deep ravine, and I saw a lot of people. It didn't occur to me that they were hiding there. When I ran to the opposite bank, two planes were flying overhead. They were flying very low and they had rapid-fire guns. That was the Russians. They were tasked with shelling the German trenches that were retreating along Route 37 towards Zdirets. And the sawmill also got hit, because it's close to the road. It all dawned on me when two hills fell in front of me. At that moment I thought: Not that way! And I came back."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Žďár nad Sázavou, 14.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:28:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Žďár nad Sázavou, 17.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:31:55
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu 1945 - End of the War. Comming Home, leaving Home.
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The events of that time had a drastic effect on the young man‘s soul

František Svoboda in 1949
František Svoboda in 1949
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

František Svoboda was born on 10 September 1930 in Žďár nad Sázavou. He comes from a poor family. His father worked as a shoemaker, his mother as a seamstress. His grandfather Antonín Svoboda, a veteran of World War I, lived with the family. In 1932, the family suffered a fire in which their house burned down. Subsequently, the economic crisis hit them hard. The situation did not improve even during the war, when fear of the Germans added to the poverty. During the Heydrichiad, their cottage was searched by the Gestapo. At the end of the war František experienced the retreat of the German troops through Žďár nad Sázavou. In 1948 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. From the 1950s he worked as a janitor in the Žďár primary school. During the days around the August 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, his two sons went missing. It took several days before he was reunited with them. In 2021 he was living in his family home in Žďár nad Sázavou.