"I said no, I want to go to the army because I'd been deferred twice. So I went and was an irregular. That means I didn't have to run carrying a rifle. They didn't care in the army, though; I got one and had to run anyway. I only did it for nine days. We couldn't eat properly then; when I tell the boys they say they had plenty of food. When we came in for lunch back in Jeseník, the first platoon of the company had time to eat; the second platoon had about half the time and the third platoon just grabbed bread, I mean dumplings and meat in their mouths and had to go again. The boys didn't believe me. I only endured it for nine days, and then I stuck my rifle's bayonet into the ground, unbuckled my belt and took off the 'nuclear' shoes. I played football so I could run a bit, but by the time we had run the three kilometres to the foothill in Jeseník, I couldn't hold my rifle right, clutching it to my chest and stumbling. I put up the bayonet, stuck it in, and said I was going to see the doctor the next day. I was there for about three weeks and then I went to an infirmary in Jeseník. Then I went to Brno to the Masaryk quarter for a while. There was a headquarters of the internal guard. And then I went home."
"I went to school at age seven because I'm an October boy. By the time I went to high school for the first year, my headaches were so bad that I went to hospital in Hradiště for about four or five months. That's where I was looking for the stairs. I didn't find them. And that's where I did my first theatre play as a prince. It was in '52, there were still nuns there. The nuns were taken away in '53. One always gave me shots, and I only wanted her to do it. One time she went to visit my parents. I liked her so much that I didn't want to get shots from anybody else, so I ended up injecting myself as a twelve or eleven year old. I was in that hospital for about four or five months, half the school year. They told me to study over the holidays and take the tests then. I didn't want to, it wouldn't be worth it. I was supposed to go back to the first year school but they cancelled the type of school meanwhile and there were only eight-year schools. I went to the sixth grade and did the eighth grade to have elementary education completed. Then I went to apprenticeship at sixteen and my friends went at fourteen."
"It was interesting in our block. At the end of the war, when the Russians and even more Romanians had already started liberating Hodonín, we all hid in the laundry room. The German woman Dohnalová was there ['Pupi, dom!']. She was there and we hid her because we didn't hate her. Not that people hated her, either. They liked her and didn't mind she was German. We hid her in a concrete rainwater tank in the house. Those were in every house for women to wash laundry in. It was dry, there was no water, and they hid her in there. And I remember a Russian, not a Romanian, who broke the door with his machine rifle. He kicked the door in, broke it open and said: 'No Germans?' - 'No!' That was it."
"When the planes started flying, we initially went to the cellar, the laundry room, but then people got tired of it and didn't hide in there anymore. It even got to the point where we were playing outside because the planes were dropping these aluminium foil strips, supposedly to fool the radar. But I don't know why, because it was daytime and the planes were clearly visible. We saw silver lines as they flew. We had a great time watching it and collected the foil strips as kids. On that day, we got home for lunch. My brother was late, playing behind the track, and my other brother and I went for lunch. But before we could eat, it started. We sat by the window like we always did and watched because it was a beautiful sight to see them fly. When it started for real, there was no waiting, no thinking. Mum didn't wait, grabbed my brother and we darted to the basement. She was barefoot. We were probably wearing shoes, I mean, I was and the little one was probably barefoot too. We lived downstairs, so it was eight or ten steps to the door that went to the street. Running towards the door, my mum was about to turn into the cellar, but a woman started panicking and shouting, 'Gas, gas, gas!' So my mother ran outside to the corner. There was a bakery; two Austrians used to go there to get bread that Mr. Hrádek baked for them. We ran out just when it exploded and hit the fourth block. It took out half of that block and there were shards on both sides. I was very lucky the shrapnels were of millimetre size. The doctors said they were tiny - if they had been bigger, they would have killed me. My mother's elbow skin was cut. She had this scar there. And my brother's foot was torn off at the ankle. It was hanging on the skin. But the shrapnel was hot, so it stopped the blood vessels and he didn't bleed out."
Stanislav Zámečník was born in Hodonín on 10 October 1939 to Anna and Stanislav Zámečníks. They lived in newly built apartment houses in Janáčkova Street with other young families. The children used to play around the houses and behind the nearby railway line, not realizing it was wartime and the planes flying over their heads could be dangerous. Until November 30, 1944, when Hodonín was bombed by the Americans... His mother with children wanted to hide in the cellar, but fled into the street in fear of the escaping gas. Stanislav was hit by two shrapnels in the head and his younger brother‘s foot was torn off. The eldest brother hid in a barn with his friends. His father found him there returning from work on the railway. Stanislav also remembers the liberation by the Red Army, hiding a German neighbour, and also August 1968 when he with his daughter in a pram passed Soviet tanks. His parents joined the communist party after the war but left in 1953. A cousin in Bruntál set fire to his farm at the beginning of the collectivisation and hanged himself. Stanislav suffered from headaches for a long time because one shrapnel could not be removed. He missed school and spent less than a fortnight in the army. He apprenticed as a car mechanic. He enjoys amateur theatre. He married and has two children. He lived with his wife in the family‘s house in Hodonín in 2025.
