Bedřich Zedníček

* 1922

  • “There were air raid warnings, and we were supposed to go to the basement. We were in the storage room and there were long and short boards and they started shooting at the airplanes and they were falling into water and all of a sudden we heard a kind of a roaring sound and it did not sound good at all. These were the bombs and we were very close to them. They hit apartment buildings and a gas holder, and another bomb dropped about sixty metres away from us. We then went to look at it and we saw the damaged apartment houses, and there was a crater and scattered goods in the place where a shop used to be. Some time later I escaped and returned to the Protectorate, I came home and I lived there hidden away from sight.”

  • “The factory was taken over by Germans who sent overseers there and we continued working as usual. The factory produced many things for the army, and therefore there was a wire fence around it and nobody could enter there unless he had an identification card, and it was a regular work.”

  • “My friend and I wanted to run away and he told me that there was a group in southern Moravia which was sending people for work by train, and that you could cross over from Hungary to Yugoslavia, and from there they were going to France where they joined the army. I sent a message through my brother-in-law that if I had not come home he should tell them where I was, but when it was our time to go, he came and told us that the Gestapo had meanwhile arrested them, and we thus could not go anywhere.”

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    Brno, 26.05.2016

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    délka: 04:28:51
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Life is a fight

Bedřich Zedníček as a young boy, around 1926
Bedřich Zedníček as a young boy, around 1926
zdroj: pamětníka

Bedřich Zedníček was born July 30, 1922 in Dlouhá Ves near Kojetín in Moravia to František and Žofie Zedníček. He spent his childhood and youth in Vrchoslavice and in Zlín. He had two sisters, elder Jiřina and younger Jindřiška. His father died of tuberculosis in 1933 and the widowed mother of three children had a hard time to make ends meet. When he was fourteen years old, Bedřich became employed in the Baťa factory in Zlín where he began his vocational training as a machine modeller. In 1942 he was sent to Vienna to do forced labour there, but he managed to escape and return to the Protectorate twice. After his second escape he then stayed in his native region in his uncle‘s home in Hoštice-Heroltice until the end of the war. After the war he began working in Baťa factory again, but the company soon became nationalized. Bedřich continued working there until 1989 when he retired. Bedřich has two children - son Pavel, who became a well-known actor, and daughter Dagmar, who is a psychologist. He lives in Brno.