Milan Enc

* 1936

  • "When I worked here in Boleslav, I lived in Zelenec, just before the Strnad family. I was working there on those brakes, suddenly on Sunday or Saturday three guys came to us. I went out and asked them what they wanted, and he said, 'We're from the State Police.' They showed me something, and, 'We want to talk to you, can you come with us?' So I just told my wife I'd be here in a minute. And I went on a six-and-a-three to Klánovice, U Smolíků pub, where they took me to one room. There was a briefcase on the table, and I looked at it with a tape recorder, and they asked me about the security stuff. For example, if it was possible for someone to get that engine, there were just engines in those twenty-one [Mig-21] and some of those engines were secret. If it's possible for someone to take pictures of them and such. And I tell them calmly at the time: 'Whoever comes there will put the sail away like this and can click it, no one will notice it there.' That's what I told them then. And they still wanted to see if I wanted to work with them. I told them Dad didn't really like these Gestapo informers, so I won't report either. And I had peace from them."

  • "In the year 1988, on August 21, when the Russians invaded our country, I remember that day that I was lying by the open window, sleeping, I could still hear air-planes. Because it was a flight to Kbely, when the planes were sitting, it was a route. Airplanes were heard all night, so I said: 'It's only a training, it's not possible!' And in the morning, when I got up, I learned that we had been attacked. Immediately we got to work and the first thing we did was that we put together a radio car, which we made available to the radio. Because the Russians went on the radio, we made it available to them. I know that the car, the radio car, was then somewhere near Český Brod, near the radio, what are the two of them, we called it flytraps. And otherwise we immediately threw ourselves on all the aircraft that were operational, and we removed from them the components, without which he could not take off, there was no way to detach from the ground."

  • "In the year 1945, that was the beginning of January, it was snowing, the sun was shining and I drove a sawdust from Mr. Materna, the plumber. It was this diameter, this kind of cylinder, and the wood sawdust was stuffed into it, there was a rod in the middle, which then pulled out, it ignited in the stove from below, and it burned all night. There was no coal after the war, nothing, and this was a great thing. So I drove the cauldron home and saw a machine gun shooting and planes flying, and I saw it chasing, and suddenly a wing flew away from the one. And the wing spun like this, it fell to Čelákovice. And the pilot flew, I thought he would fall to Zelenec. He flew down, he spun like this, he had a cockpit pulled up like this, he had his hand outside and he did it like that. And I saw it, I saw his hood, the way he does, the way he waves, and then it exploded. And he fell between Dehtár and Zelenč, about halfway through. Recently, I led some people from the Institute of History who were looking for the place and found it. I ran there right away, left the kettle in front of the barracks and ran there. And when I ran there, it was already burning and I saw people pulling out a parachute, tangled, pulling him out. And suddenly the Germans arrived on motorcycles and a German, a fat one, rushed to us and drove us away. There were about four or five of us boys. And he drove us a little into that scarp by the road, we had to lie down there, and he stood over us and held us, we couldn't look out. And we just lay down, so it started banging, because there were also sharp cartridges, a machine gun, a cannon, then it started banging. That's how he actually saved our lives."

  • Full recordings
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    Zeleneč, 19.11.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:01:21
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Airplanes as a lifelong love

20-year old Milan Enc in 1956
20-year old Milan Enc in 1956
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Milan Enc was born on July 10, 1936 in Zelenec. His father ran a radio and electricity shop and repair. During the war, he was obliged to remove shortwave coils from all radios so that it was not possible to listen to the forbidden radio on the device. Milan Enc started its primary school in Zelenec; later it continued in neighboring Svémyslice. He recalls the fall of the fighter just below Zelenec in January 1945 and the bombing of Prague in March 1945. He witnessed the arrival of the Red Army in Zelenč and the disarmament of German soldiers in Svémyslice. After the war, he travelled with his father to the border, where in the empty houses after the displaced Germans, they collected radios, repaired them and gave them to people who had none. In September 1948, his grandmother, the head of Sokol in Zelenec, took him to Prague for the funeral of Edvard Beneš. After graduating from elementary school, thanks to his father’s acquaintances, he avoided the profession of miner and metallurgist and trained as a mechanical locksmith. He worked in Mladá Boleslav in car brakes and in Prague’s Motorlet, in 1956 he went to the army to go to Střelské Hoštice near Sušice. The secret police tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to cooperate. Milan’s father worked at the airport in Kbelí as a test pilot, and Milan was hired as a technician by the Kbely air repair shops. He recalls the occupation of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, when he and his colleagues assembled a radio car for Czechoslovak Radio and removed key components from the operational aircraft, without which the aircraft could not take off. In 1989, he took part in several anti-regime demonstrations in Vysočany. Just before retiring in 1996, he spent a year at a flight school in Ghana, teaching students how to repair aircraft. In 2021 he lived in Zelenec.