Jan Francl

“Well and this is how it started with the signaling. Because Vily, as a musician, played the trumpet with the firefighters. When there was a fire, he played the trumped to signal fire. There used to be a pub where the community center stands nowadays. He stopped at the pub to have a beer and that’s when he heard somebody signaling the fire alarm on the trumpet. He previously already had to hand in his own trumpet because the Bulgarians were supposed to manage it themselves but now he heard that fire alarm. He was fully consumed by that trumpet signaling so he went home and took the keys to the church tower. On his way to the church, he met Ondra Mikoláš, a Bulgarian. He asked him if he hadn’t heard the fire alarm. Ondra said he didn’t. So Vily ran up the tower to get a view of the village. Meanwhile, Ondra waited for him downstairs, looking after his bike. Vily didn’t see anything so he came down again. But before he could even walk down the tower, there were police men waiting for him. They took him to Drnholec to the police station. Because of course, he had taken his flash light with him to the tower and somebody saw it and reported it to the police. They even did a police reconstruction of it and found out that the beam of the flash light was barely visible from the pub. So they then let him go. But at first they took him to the police station in Drnholec, where they interrogated him. They thought that he was trying to signal to somebody in Austria, to make it possible for saboteurs to come to Czechoslovakia.”

“I went there again in 1975. It was around August, during the summer holidays. When I was getting the permission, I asked if I may take my camera with me. He said: ‘if you want to get rid of it, you should take it with you’. So I didn’t take it with me. When I saw the village I felt like crying. For the extent of devastation was simply overwhelming. It took just five years to devastate it. It really came as a shock and a big surprise to me that such devastation was possible. When came back home, I told my father about it. He said: ‘what makes you wonder about it?’ I don’t want to blame the people who came there after the Croats but it is a fact that many of them were gold diggers who came with nothing and left the place with carts loaded with all possible belongings.”