“We moved to Prague. That was because of my mother’s sister, whose husband had died in the Prague revolution in May 1945. It was bad luck; he was the first victim of the Prague revolution. He was shot to death by SS men. He was employed at the train station in Prague-Vysočany and an armoured train stopped there on 5th May in the morning. People were painting over German signs and covering them and since my uncle came from Bílina and he could thus speak German, he tried to explain to the officer who got out of the train that the railway worker who was covering the German sign actually had a right to do it, because the revolution had started, and so on. They were all quite drunk and the SS man hit my uncle in his face and my uncle fought back and hit him, too, and the SS man pulled out his gun and riddled him with bullets. My uncle got about thirty bullets in his body. He stayed alive for about two days in the Bulovka hospital and then he died two days later.”
“When I was studying the secondary technical school, I had a classmate from Makotřasy. Makotřasy is a village next to Lidice. The cadastral border ran through the place and my classmate lived at the outskirts of the village and their house stood on the dividing line between Makotřasy and Lidice. When Germans came to Lidice and began taking over the village, the first thing they did was that they started bringing in people from their workplaces and assembling them in Lidice. Lidice is near Kladno, and many people from Lidice thus worked in Kladno. In the first stage, they transported all people from the surrounding areas to Lidice, including the parents of Láďa Pulec. His parents thus found themselves in Lidice, because the soldiers thought that their house belonged to Lidice. But his father persuaded the soldiers who were taking over the village that he was not a resident of Lidice. The Germans were ‘pünktlich,’ everything had to be done according to regulations, and so they checked that the house indeed was not included in the Lidice territory, and they sent them back. Láďa’s parents had already been in the village square in Lidice where the Germans later shot all the people and burnt everything.”
“It was when we had a break and suddenly we heard an awful explosion. It was close to the pond; there is a large pond in Žinkovy. On one side of the pond, near the village, there is a pub where we were performing and just as we had a break, we heard the explosion and the windows blew open and close again. There was a gamekeeper’s lodge on the opposite side of the pond. When the gamekeeper was not at home, he would keep the lights on as a measure against poachers. A small airplane which was to drop a bomb on the Hitlerjugend accommodation facility flew in there. The place was in Žinkovy and it was called Chata – now there is a sports centre and a sports hall there, but at that time there was a building, a hotel, and Hitlerjugend stayed there. They had their training there and they were taking turns in the facility. This English airplane was to drop the bomb on that building. There was allegedly some light next to the chimney. But the pilot noticed the big light in the gamekeeper’s lodge and he dropped the bomb at the lodge. There was the pond in front of the lodge and the bomb dropped into the pond. The explosion emptied the pond, the mud, fish, and everything; everything was gone.”
František Valeš was born August 24, 1932 in the village Žinkovy in the Pilsen region. His father died when František was two years old and František then lived only with his mother and sister. He spent his childhood and the period of WWII in the countryside. As a child he witnessed how people were supplying their own food for themselves, as well as the subsequent inspections done by Germans. He also remembers when the neighbouring village Vojovice became surrounded by Germans who suspected that it served as a hiding place for paratroopers. František experienced the end of the war in Žinkovy and then he moved with his family to Prague to his aunt whose husband had died in the fighting during the Prague Uprising. František studied secondary technical school and the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Prague. For his entire life he worked in the field of mechanics and applied physics. For several years he taught at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Prague and he also worked in the Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague as well as in the Aerospace Research and Test Establishment in Prague-Letňany and in the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Pilsen. He refused to become a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia several times and he was one of the few non-Party members who held leading positions in the Institute of Thermomechanics of the Academy of Sciences.
