“When Prague called for help at about half past twelve, along with my cousin, who was a year older, we went to the station. There we met a group of people who claimed to be the Revolutionary National Committee. They were going to the National Committee (the town hall in Dobřichovice), so they took us as connections. So we spent those May days at the National Committee as couriers, operating when they needed to deliver or sort something out. A part of the SS army was passing through Dobřichovice, which was originally in Prague, but when the “Vlasovci” group arrived, there was some negotiations with the Prague representatives and in Lahovice they started to turn back and a part of them went past Dobřichovice westwards.”
“These were gradual steps. Daddy, of course, had a licensing business for the mill, and first they forbade us to do business milling. Then they forbade us to grind on your own account, we did it just for the business, which supplied the grain. We gave it to the merchants, and they sold it to you. They only paid you wages. The rent, as I said, was only in the amount of the insurance fee. So that difficult to pay. So gradually it was decreasing. At first this way, then the father became only a staff member. Then came the nationalization on 1st January 1953. The advantage was that they returned it back to us later. If it were nationalized in 1945 under the Energy Act, we would have to buy it back. Only what was nationalized after 1948 was given back.”
"Here, where the Germans or the collaborators were, as they were labeled, they got locked into the school classroom. I happened to witness an employee raning out of a farm, and if they had not ceased him, he would have ran with the rifle to the school to shoot them. What's the name of that famous novel by Škvorecký? " "The Cowards. ""That's exactly described in the novel. Of course, it's not the same, but it's exactly it. When you read it, it is as if in the movie. You realize how people behaved how they decide. It's an interesting life experience."
Antonín Havlík was born in the fourth generation in the miller´s family in Dobřichovice on 27 January, 1925. Since 1856 the Havlíks family operated the mill and later (since 1920) also an electric plant in Dobřichovice. During war the witness began studying the real gymnasium in Vyšehrad; in 1945 he was forced labour in industry and graduated only after war. He applied to studies at the Electro-technical Faculty ČVUT, but as a son of an undertaker he was expelled after the 1949 scrutinising. In 1953 the family mill was nationalised and taken from the family; the power grid was nationalized already in 1945. The residential part of the mill was returned to them in 1964, so luckily they never had to move out of the mill. Antonín Havlík worked as energetic in Středočeské mlýny and later as a technical planner in the company Kovoprojekta. In 1991 restituted a mill and electric plant together with his sister and has been operating it under his name together with his sons in Dobřichovice until 2017.
