“Well, on that fateful day, national guests were passing through Milín, they were the German emigrants. That day, April 29, was practically tragic for Milín and my family. My dad and I went to the Milín store for newspapers and food stamps, and when we were returning from Milín, the Anglo-American air force started attacking us. Well, at home mom was worried about what actually happened to us. One interesting picture is here at that moment; it is a historical picture that practically shows fallen cattle, and there is one of the German civilians reaching into his wrist, I do not know if he was taking out a gun at the time. We crawled home to the family amid the shooting and hailstorm, our mother was already waiting for us in the family, we were already worried about whether we would even be able to do anything else. Mom quickly collected some food in small bags and we took them and burned them in the direction of the Kojetín Forest, where we waited the whole time until dark. Well, at that time you could already see the Milín hill, the insulted tower of the Milín church, smoke and dust from the incinerators.”
„Well, we were working at shaft 6 and we got interrupted at work and went in a protest procession towards the Příbram mining headquarters. The tragedy for me personally was the fact that when we attacked the Russian troops there by shouting contemptuously and demanding a free life, it turned out that in the following days of our lives they marked us politically and we had a lot to pay for in private life, in the rest of the mining life. I worked on that job as a mining technician working as an overhead ventilation technician, and it turned out that at the end I was reassigned to shaft number 19, where I worked again until I retired I have had this life trauma.“
Jiří Vostarek was born on February 14, 1937 in the Kojetín district of Milín. The father worked as a road worker and after the war as a mine worker; the mother was a housewife. One of his strongest childhood memories is from the end of the war, when the Allies bombed Milín on April 29, 1945. A few days later, he experienced the last battles of the Second World War, which took place in nearby Slivica. Jiří Vostarek attended elementary school in Milín, then graduated from a four-year mining school in Příbram. He served two years of military service in the years 1957-1959 with the Border Guard. After returning, he worked as a mining technician first on iron veins in Mníšek pod Brdy, later in uranium mines in Příbram. In 1968, he was working as an overhead ventilation technician at shaft 6, when the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Because of his opposition to the occupation, he was reassigned to shaft 19 in the late sixties, to the position of an ordinary miner, where he worked until his retirement. In 1974, he took over the care of the chronicles of the village of Milín and wrote down his memoirs until 2022. At the time of the interview (2022), he lived in Kojetín in his native house, which narrowly escaped demolition in the early 1990s in connection with the construction of the R4 expressway. He died in 2024.
