"Then they sent in State Security [disguised] as firemen. That's my biggest disappointment. They wrote that a firefighter inspection was coming, and they were State Security. The attic of the castle was full of antiques and old things. And because nothing was allowed to be in the attic, I had to pile everything on a barrow before, one Sunday or Saturday, and we burned it all in the forest. That was an enormous loss, the loss of those old things."
"That's where I brought the scouts. I led them. I devoted my entire vacation to scouting. And then, when they banned it, I organized a big campfire. I've got a card here. I showed it. It had a big lily on it, and it said, well, you'll see what it said. It mainly said, 'Nobody can beat us'. This, of course, passed through the Ministry of the Interior. Then the secretary called me in and said, 'When I saw this, I said, 'Liquidate!' It didn't matter that I was an exemplary physician before and had many diplomas. I was only called to the head office by the director. At that time it was snowing, and my wife was very ill, so they put me to Volyně as a junior doctor."
"They occupied the castle. Everyone had a sign saying Red Guard or Revolutionary Guard. In the castle, there was a Hitlerjugend accountant, a former captain of the Czechoslovak army. He was a good man. He used to come and shop at our store. When the Hitlerjugend boys took away our fishing gear - we used to fish in the pond there - he brought it back to us. He lived behind Nadějkov in an old sawmill by the pond, and he assumed it would be quiet there. He lived there with his wife. At the end of the war, they moved their daughter in. She was a dispatcher at the Brno airport, she was eighteen years old. Imagine that - all of the zealous women became Communists - those zealous women went there to get his wife and his daughter. He disappeared, he ran away. They stripped them naked and chased them through stinging nettles to Nadějkov. There, they locked them in a bathroom in the castle. By an unfortunate coincidence, they arrived at about ten o'clock in the evening. I was there. I was everywhere. They locked me up in the cellar afterwards, so as not to do anything, so I saw it. So at around eleven o'clock, twelve Tatars arrived there. They had horrible beards, horrible, the kind they paint on Turks' faces in illustrations. They locked them in together. In the morning, they carried them away, the daughter unconscious, the mother ragged. They put them on a cart and took them to the hospital in Tábor. I don't think it helped the daughter much."
Milan Jindrák was born on 10 September 1932 in Nadějkov, South Bohemia. The Jindrák family had a small convenience store run by the father, Karel Jindrák. His mother, Bohumila Jindráková, née Loukotková, worked as a teacher. Her father wrote the chronicle of the town of Nadějkov. As a child, Milan Jindrák experienced the liberation of Nadějkov by the Red Army. At the age of 11, he entered the grammar school in Tábor. After two years, he transferred to the grammar school in Sušice, where he first encountered scouting and immediately became enthusiastic about its ideas and ideals. Therefore, he joined Junák there and, until 1948, led a troop of “wolf cubs”. From the age of 16, together with his future wife Irena Jindráková, née Wellner, granddaughter of František Wellner, technical director of Škoda Plzeň and owner of the castle in Vojnice, he took care of a part of the Vojnice castle. In 1964, he became a doctor. During the second renewal of Junák in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1970, he founded and led a scout troop in Volenice. On 19 May 1970, to the displeasure of the local communists, Milan Jindrák organized the last big scout meeting. After this event, they began an unscrupulous persecution against him. Various notices, denunciations, and inspections were sent against him. Eventually, he was forced to leave his post as district doctor in Volenice. From the second half of the 1970s until 1989, he worked as a district doctor in Vacov. After 1989, he restituted the castle and adjacent fields in Vojnice. In 2022, Milan Jindrák lived in Nadějkov.
Little Milan Jindrák (second from the right, sat on lap) with his family friend Mrs Šimáková, rehearsal of the theatre performance The Lešetín Blacksmith, Nadějkov, 1933
Little Milan Jindrák (second from the right, sat on lap) with his family friend Mrs Šimáková, rehearsal of the theatre performance The Lešetín Blacksmith, Nadějkov, 1933
