Alois Vychodil

* 1932

  • "As we left school, we went to the cemetery. We went to the cemetery every day for three days. There were two of those American soldiers lying in the morgue. So we looked through the window. They had these heated high boots. One day they weren't there, they got lost. After the war, the gravedigger's boys Olin and Jarda wore them. We came home, threw the schoolbags under the table and ran to the plane."

  • "I was among the first thirty who ran to the plane. The way I remember it, how many people were there... There was a balk. Bullets were coming out of the plane from machine guns that were on fire. So we watched it burn for a while. Only the fuselage was burning, not the tail or the wings. Then we went to the state farm. We were friends of boys the same age - three were '31, and three were '32. So, of course, we were there. When the machine guns started firing at the plane, it felt like it was right next to us. We were probably less than a kilometre away, even closer. All of us guys jumped in there, in the trench, and I ended up on top of them. And that was the last time I prayed 'Little angel, my guardian', that was the last time I prayed. It was the last time I was scared. Soon, we were surrounded by Germans with cars. They came from Hradiště, Otrokovice and Napajedla and surrounded the forest. And as we ran to the plane, the dirt was sizzling behind me. I thought, 'What is this?' And they were shooting at us. Fortunately, they didn't hit anybody because they were running..."

  • "On March 15, the Germans occupied us, and on Saturday, March 18, a search came to our house. They turned everything upside down - they were digging in coal, in hay, in straw in the attic, in cupboards. They even looked in the straws to see if there was anything there. There were two in uniform and one in a leather coat. He was pointing there and there - and they were digging through everything. They couldn't unlock one cupboard. So Daddy wanted them to unlock it because he was sure nothing would happen and they wouldn't find anything. So this one guy poked him until he fell. I wanted to go defend Daddy because I hated them. They didn't find anything, so they left. We lived on the corner of May 1st Street, so I went outside through the hallway to see where they were going. They were walking back towards the square, so I wanted to tell Daddy - and he was playing the violin. That's what he always did when he needed to think about something, or something was on his mind, and he was having trouble with it, so he played the violin. My mother and younger sister were sitting in the corner of the kitchen, and they were both crying. I asked Daddy, 'Daddy, did you steal something?' Because I thought they were looking for something, that he had stolen something. 'Oh, no... It's because we're communists,' he said."

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    Zlín, 11.06.2020

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I joined the Communist Party on my 16th birthday

Alois Vychodil during military service, 1950s
Alois Vychodil during military service, 1950s
zdroj: Witness archive

Alois Vychodil was born on 28 April 1932 in Napajedla near Zlín. Together with his two younger sisters, he grew up in the family of Alois and Marie Vychodils. His father was employed in the Slávia company of the Pařík brothers in Napajedla during the First Republic and made prototypes of wooden moulds for gas masks for the newly opened Fatra as a wood modeller. He was arrested as a communist resistance fighter in 1943. The consequences of his detention in Zlín, Uherské Hradiště, Kounic‘s dormitories in Brno and then his 18-month sentence in the then Breslau, today‘s Wrocław, took a great toll on his health. He returned emaciated, and for many years, he had recurrent nervous tremors. In 1944, Alois Vychodil the Younger witnessed the landing of an American Boeing in a meadow called Amerika outside Napajedla. In his old age, he and Josef Nesvadba together donated a collection of memories and historical sources to the partisans of the Bohuš paratroop group, who operated in the nearby Žlutava from February 1945 until the liberation, which was published in 2015 under the title O lidech statečných (About the Brave People - transl.). After the war, Alois joined the ČKD Napajedla company - Sláviamotor Napajedla (originally Slávia bratří Paříků) as an apprentice, where his father was still working at that time as the head of the apprenticeship and other departments. After a few years as a turner, he became an educator and later head of cadre education. He served his basic military service in Prague at the headquarters of the Border Guard. As a party member (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), he worked from the mid-1960s as secretary of the National Committee in Napajedla and later as head of the organizational department at the District National Committee in Gottwaldov. In total, he lasted 38 years in municipal politics, 14 of which were as a member of the Napajedla council. Since 2005, he has lived (and in 2020 lived) in Otrokovice.