František Lysáček

* 1951

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  • "And we already knew it was them. We could see by the photo that it was them. Of course, there was a great welcome, a great joy. They corresponded, but they didn't know anything about each other. And the uncle, how he was briefed and informed about the socialist state, how poor we were. When we came out of the airport, the uncle didn't have those galoshes, but he had rubber boots. I look at him and I tell him - he didn't forget Czech - 'Uncle, what are you wearing these for?' And he said that in Návojna, the village where he was born, that it was always muddy. And I said, 'Uncle, you're going to see something completely different.' So we picked them up at the airport, they slept at my wife's parents' house in Holešovice, we brought them on the train, they came to Návojná, and the village welcomed the native with music and singing. And he noticed and saw how different this Návojná was and how Wallachia looked. In the eighties, the houses were not furnished with luxury furniture, but they were castles. They took great care to build beautiful houses; it was their boast. It's the mentality of this end of Wallachia. And he saw all the houses and that the road was actually dry, the sidewalks were made and everything, and he started crying."

  • "My uncle, my mother's brother, who went to Canada in 1926, went there before his military service. He left because he was supposed to be convicted for desertion; he had not finished his military service with us. And that conviction would have lasted for 50 years, so he couldn't return to the Czech Republic for 50 years because he would be locked up for being a military deserter. So it was only after 50 years that he returned to the Republic for the first time. And he left in 1926. He was leaving a village in Wallachia, where Wallachia, after Orava, were the poorest regions in the Republic. Orava was very poor, and Wallachia was the same. And he left at the time of that crisis; he went to Canada to look for work. And he said they looked for a job in different ways when they got there. They travelled on the trains in different ways, but they travelled on cattle and freight trains, because they couldn't get a job anywhere, they didn't have money and so on. But Canada was so generous that immigrants who wanted to and were interested were assessed. I don't know how many acres of land they could get, but they had to farm on it. Either farm, a means of production, in terms of crop production or livestock production. He worked that way, and it wasn't until 50 years later that he was able to come back to the Republic."

  • "Then, from the media... our radio station reported that something was wrong. That's how one began to understand how the liberators who liberated us in 1945, why they are occupying us again. But there were some political events happening in Prague and Moscow, and we didn't know what was going on. But then we heard what was actually happening. Prague, shooting into the crowd and everything. It was terrible for us, of course. We had already begun to understand, as 18- and 19-year-olds, why they first liberated us, and now they were occupying us. The radio urged us to take down the signs - Veselí nad Moravou, Brno. We painted over everything, even the arrows. It was a little boycott. A little of what people could do in those villages and towns. What was happening in the cities was worse, but in the villages, people boycotted this way and disagreed with what the Soviet army had done."

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    Litoměřice, 23.11.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:26:49
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I have helped in lime kilns in Bangladesh, Egypt and Italy

František Lysáček in his youth
František Lysáček in his youth
photo: Witness archive

František Lysáček was born on 9 January 1951 in Sidonia, Wallachia. He grew up in a family with five other siblings. After attending the municipal school in Brumov-Bylnice, he began his studies in Valtice. At the same time, he worked in Veselí nad Moravou. Later, he joined Přerov Engineering Works, which was part of ČKD. He became an expert in rotary furnaces and continued this work even later when he moved from Moravia to Litoměřice. Thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages, he was able to take part in foreign assemblies, working for example in Bangladesh, Egypt or Italy. He had access to vouchers [bony in Czech] for working abroad. After the revolution, he founded his own assembly company. In 2023, he lived in Litoměřice.