Josef Zawadský

* 1941

  • "When I mentioned foot-and-mouth disease, it had something to do with religion in the Hlučín region. In the fifties the churches were closed. You weren't allowed to go to churches. I remember it vividly. It was at Christmas in 1950. We used to go to the Midnight Mass and in Háj, which is just across the Opavice river, it was not closed, so we went there for Midnight Mass. Then I wanted to go to our church on Christmas Day, because I used to be an altar boy. The church was closed. It was sad to see elderly women kneeling in front of the church door because they hadn't gone to Midnight Mass in Háj. It was really cold then, and they were kneeling in the freeze in front of the closed church and praying. It didn't last long, just a few months or weeks."

  • "It's a bit of a sad memory, but when we were running from that cellar, one German soldier didn't manage to escape before the front. He said, 'I have two little boys like that at home too.' When we came back, we saw him under our big lime tree. He was shot dead. After the war, when they were burying the soldiers where they died, he was buried under that lime tree. We used to go there as children to put there flowers for him. But that didn't last long. About half a year later, the soldiers who had fallen on the territory of Dolní Benešov were exhumed and taken to the cemetery."

  • "Mum just had time to let the cow off the chain. The cow ran after us, but everything was on fire around us. The neighbour´s [house] behind us was also on fire. Everything was in a blaze. I remember the bullets whistling and we were running to the chateau. We survived three nights there before the front passed. Then we were going back. Of course, when the soldiers were running, they were taking everything. So it happened that my mother didn't have a bedroom. Everything was scattered in the trenches to make it easier for the soldiers to get to the other side. It also happened that when we came back, my mother found only bones left from the cow."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 18.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:07:38
  • 2

    Ostrava, 25.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:01:37
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My father survived the Russian front. He died of starvation in the camp in Kuřim

Josef Zawadský / 1961
Josef Zawadský / 1961
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Josef Zawadský was born on 30 April 1941 in Dolní Benešov in the Hlučín region, which at that time belonged to the German Reich. His father had to enlist in the Wehrmacht and he was sent to the Russian front. In 1946 he returned from captivity, but died in the prison camp in Kuřim. Josef remembers the front going across Dolní Benešov in the spring of 1945. After 1948, when the Communists began to rule Czechoslovakia, he experienced the collectivization of agriculture. His mother owned about three hectares of fields and refused to join a cooperative farm. Josef Zawadský trained as a bricklayer and graduated from a building technical seconndary school. He worked in the enterprise Pozemní stavby (Ground Constructions) Ostrava and then in the armature factory in Dolní Benešov. During a party interview after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, he expressed his opposition to the occupation. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, he was mayor of Dolní Benešov for the Czechoslovak People‘s Party (ČSL) for twelve years. In 2022 he was still living in the same place.