Zdeněk Brom

* 1937

  • "And Novotný, he didn't stay with the partisans for very long. He returned home and lived at home, but he had the advantage, he was from Vyžice and actually lived near the forest. He almost had fawns in his backyard. So he could run to the forest at any time. And he returned home and there was a dance party in Bukovina, and he asked for a solo for the partisans during the dance party. That broke it all. The next day they gathered them all and released most of them, but not him, they kept him. They persuaded him to cooperate, they gave him a camera, they needed to find out something else. They gave him money and gave him a number for Mayer, the leader of the Gestapo, the antipartisan resistance in Cologne. And he came back, went to the partisans, they checked him out, found him ... found the Gestapo number. He was sentenced to death by the partisan oath and shot. "

  • "The second one, he lived with the Ouřecki in the barn, and the other day, when the partisans jumped off the Lovčice and went to the Železné hory, it was the twenty-sixth evening. So on the 27th, Ouřecky gave him a small shotgun and allegedly sent him to pick some mushrooms. However, at the end of October, almost around All Souls Day, he sent him to pick mushrooms and gave him a small shotgun. He didn't take the basket. And when he was stopped there by a Russian guerrilla, who jumped down, he had a small shotgun over his shoulder, the shotgun, and he had a hare in his hand. And thus he got acquainted with the "original" partisans. "

  • "In the pub, there were the guys under construction by morning. And the worst part was, as they said, there was one from the Cologne Gestapo. Some Otradovsky, Otradovec. And he kicked them. As they fell asleep and fell on the floor, they had to stand apart and he kicked them. He had a wooden leg, some prosthesis, and he kicked them with that wooden leg. So every time someone wanted to fall asleep, even whilst standing up, he kicked him. They were there until morning, then they brought the men from the syringe, who sprayed on the barn, as they introduced the syringe there. Well, they didn't put it out anyway and the barn burned down. So they brought them there. They loaded them in the morning, everywhere it is called a bus. Well, there was no bus with us, only a small lorry or a minivan arrived. But they were there with a truck, I remember, because a neighbour cut a slice of bread, wrapped it, and I ran after that truck and threw it to that neighbour's car, to that truck. "

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    Hradec Králové ED, 17.07.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 02:25:40
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
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The beer flowed, but there was no one to drink it

Zdenek Brom, on the left, with his family
Zdenek Brom, on the left, with his family
photo: archiv pamětníka

Zdeněk Brom was born on September 21, 1937, in the small village of Licoměřice at the foot of the Železné hory as the second son of a carpenter’s family. As a small boy, he experienced a Nazi raid at the end of 1944, during which a guerrilla unit operating in the Licoměřice region was discovered, which was helped by local citizens. After the raid, more than 100 men and several women were taken from Licoměřice and nearby Lipovec to the prison in Terezín’s Small Fortress, where 25 of them succumbed to typhus and several others died after their return in May 1945. The witness also witnessed the departure of defeated German troops. In the 1950s, the family lost its small field and the witness’s mother had to join the collective farm as a workforce. Zdeněk Brom trained as a mechanical locksmith and after graduating from school he joined the stone quarry in Prachovice as a mechanical maintenance worker, where he worked until his retirement. He dedicated his whole life to the commemoration of the war events that took place at the end of the war in his native village and its surroundings, he writes his own chronicle and also contributed to several publications devoted to partisan groups in the foothills of the Iron Mountains.