Zdeněk Filípek

* 1933

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  • "Then they arrested him [my father]. I was in the army by then. He was in Slovakia for five months and then, when we were evicted, he got twenty months. It's funny: they put him in the mines in Kladno - I had just come back from there, and he just went there. The weather was nice on Saturday, so I took a ride on my motorbike - I bought a motorbike in the military. I went to Sviny, met the boys, and we were chatting. They asked how my dad was. I said, 'He's good, he's in Kladno. I came from there, it's good there.' He ended up in Jáchymov within a fortnight..."

  • "Brož would be quite interested, but it was hard to do anything among people. We had a pole on the farm with a light mounted on it. One day, we were killing a pig illegally, and we needed a canning machine from this Brož. So, I pretended to fix something on the pole in daytime, and I loosened the light bulb. The next day I tightened it up again." - "So that no one would see you killing?" - "So that no one would see me carry the machine. You never knew who was watching."

  • "One day we came in and one miner said, 'Guys, no. It's crumbling. Let's stay here, we could even go back a little bit.' It fell down after a while, thirty by forty in area. Four metres of picked coal broke off and fell. They thought we'd keep going, but the miner said, 'It's crumbling, we'd better wait here.' It took about two hours, but it fell." - "Well, that was lucky." - "The miners knew it. If they'd sent us there, we'd all be buried there." - "You weren't afraid afterwards?" - "I wasn't. I was never afraid."

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    Chotýčany, 24.03.2025

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    duration: 01:54:22
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I was never afraid

Zdeněk Filípek in the army, 1953-1955
Zdeněk Filípek in the army, 1953-1955
photo: Witness's archive

Zdeněk Filípek was born in Sviny near Veselí nad Lužnicí on 16 June 1933 as the second of four children to farmer Jan Filípek and his wife Božena, née Vondrášková. His parents farmed 29 hectares of land and the father was a horse trader. During the war, partisans stayed on the farm overnight and the father helped them buy cattle. Little Zdeněk used to distribute the money for the cattle to the individual farmers by bicycle. After the communist coup in 1948, he was not allowed to attend high school as the son of a “kulak” or work on the family farm later on. His father Jan Filípek, the mayor of Sviny until 1948, refused to join the farming cooperative (JZD) and was deployed on forced labour, deprived of his property and imprisoned. Both sons served in the punitive PTP military units. The family was displaced to Zběšičky at the end of 1955. After the November Revolution of 1989, some of the property was returned to the family in restitution, but the family farm no longer existed at the time. Zdeněk Filípek used some stones from the original barn to build an annex to his house in Chotýčany where he spends his retirement.