Family paid the highest price for the war – a human life
Stanislav Machů was born on August 10, 1936 in Vysoké Pole in Valašsko [mid-east Moravia] into a large family of Josef and Anna Machů. During the Second World War, his parents and older siblings got involved in helping partisans who were connected to the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka. When the Nazis burned down the Ploština settlement as a reprisal on April 19, 1945, his brother František, who worked as a messenger for the partisans, was one of twenty-four victims. Only one person managed to survive the Ploština massacre. Stanislav’s uncle Jan Machů. After members of the Jagdtkommando [search taskforce] drove several condemned persons into a burning house, he managed to escape from the building, put out the smouldering clothes and hide in the woods. He returned to his family during the night. The Mach family was not left in peace even after the loss of their son František. One year after the Communist Party came to power, Stanislav’s father, Josef Machů, was sentenced to twenty years in prison and deprived of all his property due to his written commitment to help the anti-communist organization Světlana. He was released in amnesty in 1956. His wife, Anna, had died two years earlier of total organ failure and probably due to sadness and grief. Stanislav trained as a mechanical locksmith in the 1950s and started to work for Zbrojovka in Vsetín, where he spent his professional life until 1986, when at the request of the National Committee he took up a position of the quitting mayor of Vysoké Pole. He spent sixteen years in office. He and his wife Maria raised three children, Alena, Jitka and Miroslav.
