František Čanda

Mr. Čanda is reciting Karel Toman’s poem September: “My brother finished ploughing and unharnessed the horse. And as the sun sets, he silently laid his head into his faithful friend’s mane and listened to the voice of the land. From far away, bells toll through the silent holy eve, the prayers from villages rise through the chilly dusk. Saint Wenceslas, do not let us or our descendants perish.”

“I come from the beautiful region of Sedlčany, which was unfortunately taken over by SS soldiers, the whole district. And I dared to recite a poem about Saint Wenceslas there and thus I became an enemy of the Reich, because they did not like Saint Wenceslas. They started investigating it right on the following day and the SS men had guns and leather coats and their gun magazines full of cartridges and they interrogated me whether I had recited that poem or not. They interrogated the whole class, they knew approximately what grade I was in according to my age. I did not confess and then one teacher told me: ‘Franta, confess it, if you don’t, they shoot.’ They shot a farmer in the neighbouring village, because he had a secret pig slaughter, and one more in addition. They arrived there, they saw the slaughtered pig hanging there and they asked him what he was thinking when the German army and Germans soldiers were bleeding at the war front and he was slaughtering a pig there. They made him and his farmhand and his son stand against the barn door. Then they took the meat and they left their bodies there, shot dead. Then they interrogated me, they knocked my teeth out and I have everything broken in my mouth. I even had a new set of teeth made in Switzerland, but they told me that they were not able to affix anything in there, because it had been broken so badly.”

Interviewer: “Did you later face some repercussions because of that as well, did you have any restrictions?” – “I was evicted from my village, and then they could not do much more to me. They forgot about me, they had other things to worry about, two war fronts open, and then Hitler drove them to the war front. They told me: ‘You can plead guilty, there are only Czech SS men here right now, and Czech policemen will investigate it.’ But there were the same SS men and they hit me with their fists and when I fell down, they started kicking me.”