We went home
Stáhnout obrázek
František Beneš was born in 1923 as the member of the Czech minority in the area of Volyn, now in Ukraine. During WW2 the area was harshly hit; the Pols, Ukrainians, Russians and Germans met there. František´s father was the major of Sergejevka, which was the Czech village near the regional town of Luck. František remembers the threatening on part of the Bandera group (translator´s note: nationalistic military group), who tried to get hold of the food stocks; as a twenty-year-old boy I witnessed my native village being burnt down. In 1944 together with my older brother Břetislav we joined the army of the general Svoboda, and experience the battle of the Dukla pass. After returning to Czechoslovakia he spent some time in the military service and later settled in the Southern Moravia. He was forced to join the agricultural cooperative, where he worked for 28 years. He also found his wife there and had four children together. Later he worked as a church steward and a minister.
