My wife hid me....
František Ištván was born on the 29th of April 1914 in Vémyslice. He comes from a rural family, and one of his ancestors was from Croatia. Ištván‘s father died soon after his birth, which was during the First World War. He grew up with his aunt, as his mother remarried. In his childhood, he was a member of Sokol, and his orphan‘s fee financed his studies at the Teacher‘s Institute, the Znojmo Grammar School. Ištván had a desire to continue his studies, and he had an interest in modernist literature and poetry (he was a patriot, afterall). He joined the army, entering in as an intern in NCO schooling, and was soon made a reserve officer when he completed school. He served with the 24th Infantry Regiment in Znojmo. Ištván‘s first act in defence of the Republic was in 1938 during the first mobilisation, where he guarded the borders with weapon in hand commanding a mortar company against the night forays of German saboteurs. After the occupation, Ištván joined the resistance group Defence of the Nation (Obrana národa). In 1941, he was supposed to be arrested, but his fiancée‘s (now wife‘s) family helped hide him. After a year spent in hiding, the gestapo caught him on the 20th of July 1942, and he was arrested for activity within the Defence of the Nation. Ištván was convicted in Vratislav and imprisoned in the Kounicovy Campus House in Brno. In May 1943, he was released after serving his sentence. Such a light sentence was possible only because Ištván had made an agreement in jail with two of his witnesses, his former superiors from the DoN, who were supposed to speak out against him. After the War, Ištván studied at the University of Dr. Edvard Beneš and became a civil engineer. Ištván stayed in the army, and worked as a planner for military construction projects.