František Varaďa

* 1932

  • "I experienced March 15 in the first class. The occupation. And we found out, because when I came to school, the right side and the gym were taken up. And there, in the morning, before it was separated by such walls, German soldiers were lined-up, around half past seven. Before they covered it there so that we wouldn't see them. They used our gym. Well, our school had to squeeze in the rooms that were left."

  • "Then the German wagons began [to come]. It means the horses, the wagons, and they [Germans] were usually going on them. And I have a very ugly memory. The Germans - when you drive from Brod, you go downhill. It is said that ´first you go up and down, and then down the hill´, when you are going from Brod, from the square towards Hradiště. And the wagons weren´t braking. And behind the wagons on which the Germans were sitting, maybe four of them, and they had the kitchen behind it, and the cars were driving in between - so behind them the Russian prisoners were tied up. Barefoot. By hand, as in the Middle Ages, each on one side of the car. And they trotted down the hill behind those wagons. Three or four Germans were sitting on them and looking at them [the prisoners]. "

  • "That summer, around the months of July and August, the flights were so intense that they flew every day except Sunday. So we were at school until ten o'clock, and then we ran away. At the beginning, we went with the teachers to hide only in the park, and as they [planes] flew towards north, the lessons went on. However, it wasn´t possible later in August. Because there were already so many planes - they just left the stripes. We watched them."

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    13.06.2020

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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How I met the war in Brod

František Varaďa while recording the interview, 2020
František Varaďa while recording the interview, 2020
zdroj: Recording 2020

František Varaďa was born on September 22, 1932 in Uherský Brod. At the age of seven, just after the Second World War had started, he experienced the arrival of German soldiers. During the war, he saw changes in society and school through a child‘s eyes. In his street, the Gestapo arrested resistance movement members, and numerous transports of Jews, of which only a handful returned home after the war, were sent out of the city. František also saw an air battle with his own eyes. After the war, he started a school in Varnsdorf on the North Bohemian border, he trained to become a knitting machines mechanic and then passed the school-leaving examination at the Higher Technical School in Brno. During the military service, which he served from 1952 to 1954, he joined the Communist Party. He started to work in the arms factory in Uherský Brod. Being a young communist, he had to go to farmers to persuade them to join cooperative farms. However, he resented it and he announced to the management that he would no longer carry out such an activity. As a punishment, he was reassigned to a worse job position. He got married, and with his wife Ludmila they raised two daughters, Marcela and Stanislava. František Varaďa definitively broke up with the Communist Party after the August occupation in 1968. Daughter Marcela could not then study her dream school. František Varaďa wrote the book How I Met the War in Brod about what he experienced as a child in his hometown.