Josef Mišák

* 1928

  • "And at the first party meeting, I was invited to join the militia. And I already had some kind of training, so I told them very competently that it sucks. Of course, I didn't say that, but that I'm not going to join the militia under any circumstances, because it's a useless organization. That's what I said politely, useless organization, because we have three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers: 'You know I was in the military service, I know more things than normal soldiers know, we have the Soviet Union behind us. Why should the boys roam somewhere on training, it's not, it's useless.' Well, that's when I ended my career in Brumov, of course. However, my dad, I said, I came home and I said, 'Dad, I could be famous today, I could have joined the militia.' 'You would have nowhere to sleep anymore!'

  • "I went to the train station in Kunovice and there was an inspection. There sat such a beautiful girl, she ran to me, grabbed me by the arm and: "Pretend to by my lover." So that the idiots who came to check on me do not ask about us. I was still in Kunovice at that time, but I would have saved myself, because but she was Slovak. Then she thanked me, when they left, and I never saw her again in my life."

  • "When it was announced for those twenty minutes, because the sirens sounded for twenty minutes and then they sounded for five minutes, so when they sounded for twenty minutes, the factory was depopulated. They run from Otrokovice all the way through the water, through Moravia and beyond Moravia to that Bříšek, which is behind Moravia. And so, we were hidden there in the woods, and then we saw that as the planes flew to Warsaw and somewhere from below. And for once, a group of about fifteen of them turned around, decreased until, I don't know, two kilometers or how much they threw it at Zlín, so then, we saw from the shore, how it exploded, the smoke that was coming out of it and so on. So, I had it as, I say, as a theater."

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    Přerov, 04.02.2020

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    duration: 02:20:56
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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We can make a life beautiful

Josef Mišák during the military service, 1951
Josef Mišák during the military service, 1951
photo: archive of the witness

Josef Mišák was born on October 16, 1928 in Bylnice in Wallachia. At the beginning of the Second World War, his father joined the activities of the illegal resistance group Defense of the Nation, helping soldiers of the pre-war Czechoslovak army to escape across the border into Slovakia. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940, and Josef Mišák Sr. spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp. His son, meanwhile, had joined Baťa’s school of work. At the end of 1944, Josef was called up for forced labor. He dug anti-tank trenches in Kunovice. When it became clear that the war was coming to an end, he decided to flee. Two years before graduating in 1948, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, from where he withdrew at his own request after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. Josef Mišák worked all his life in technical fields and thanks to that he was able to travel a large part of Europe. He and his wife Josefa raised three children, Jaroslav, Pavla and Josef. In February 2020 he lived in Přerov.