“And it was in 1960 and they, the State Security, left me alone before I was about to start in Budějovice that is almost fourteen years. And they did not come to me immediately, only after half a year, another State Security officer came to my flat and started immediately about collaboration. He came on the day I had birthday, it was certainly some kind of psychological pressure that it was on my birthday, and he told me about collaboration. So, I replied: ‘Look, I am from a village and when people know that someone is secretly a grass to the cops, even in the pub no one sits next to him.’ And he said: ‘It is not grassing up on people.’ So why do you do it secretly? Why don’t you recruit those people openly and why do you visit me in my flat? There were some more questions, still about the collaboration. When I refused the collaboration, he left. That was in 1974 and then they left me alone.”
“But about two months later they transferred him and the captain Jan Miščina came, he was an unpleasant man, perhaps the military service was worst during the time he was in charge. He was there about nine months and he went to check on us in the workplace and we had to report to him. On the military construction, there were also civilians employed, Zvolen is close to Detva, the famous lively Slovak village, and there were craftsmen from Detva, one carpenter was from Detva. He stood on scaffolding and the captain walked under him. The carpenter took his carpenter’s hatchet and threw it into the air above him and told him in Slovak: ‘Janko, take a look how this hatchet flashes by. And when you will chase those men, I will drive it in your back.’ And since then, the captain did not go to check on us anymore, really. So, the carpenter helped us.”
“Well in one gamekeeper’s lodge, it was in the woods, further from the village, one man was hiding there. His name was Navrátil, the Englishmen or Americans had a walkie-talkie at his place in Moravia, supposedly, I do not know for sure. He was somewhere at a funeral in autumn 1941 and meanwhile the gestapo came for him to his house, so someone warned him, he did not go home anymore. By us in Kardašova Řečice he had a sister and in Třeboň he had a brother. And they advised him, they arranged it with the forester Erla that he can live with him in the gamekeeper’s lodge. No one knew who he is, everyone called him uncle. He went with the senior forester in forest to see the workmen, anyway my dad knew him well, they called him uncle, they did not even know what his name was. Then during the Heydrichiáda the beans were spilled – that he hid there. So, they caught them and shot seven people, those two, they belonged to our village, one of them was called Hejtmánek, he was in charge of residence registration and deregistration, so he was shot as well, then his sister, also his brother with his wife and moreover one woman from Soběslav, in total they executed seven people. But Navrátil, he managed to hide, they did not catch him immediately, then he made it with a scythe on his shoulder and a basket even to Moravia, to his home. There he hid for another two years, until then it was revealed in 1944. One farmer, who knew about it, said it drunk in a pub. So, then he was caught and seventeen people were executed including him. Well in total, twenty-four people were executed.”
Václav Kulhánek was born on 14th February 1930 in Drahov near Veselí nad Lužnicí to a rather poor family. His father was a bricklayer and moreover he had a small farm with four hectares of land. His mother had nine siblings. As a boy, he looked up to local parish priest František Bezpalec. When he was 14 years old, he decided to become a priest, after the war he studied at a grammar school in České Budějovice and after finishing it he entered the priestly seminary in the same city. However, he studied only for a year, afterwards the communist regime shut down the seminary. Václav as a seminarist entered the compulsory military service as member of the technical auxiliary battalions (PTP) in 1950, where he served for more than three years. He came back home on 31st December 1953. Another almost 20 years he worked in blue collars jobs in a concrete plant Prefa in Veselí nad Lužnicí. He was active in the Red Cross, wrote a municipal chronicle of Drahov and he became a blood donor. In 1968 he started to study remotely the faculty of theology and finished it in 1973. First, he served as a chaplain in České Budějovice. He refused to collaborate with the State Security. In 1970s he entered in the movement of catholic priests called Pacem in Terris which founding was initiated by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1982 he left Pacem in Terris after the pope John Paul II. distanced himself from the movement. After 1989 he was an archivist of the České Budějovice diocese and later a chancellor of the diocese. He was awarded a Chaplain of His Holiness, a title for meritorious priests. He died on 6th February 2021.
