“They came to my father and ordered him to display a German flag immediately. We had a beautiful cherry tree in front of the station building, and they threatened that if he did not swear on the flag, they would hang him on that cherry tree. At first they were beating him, dragging him on the ground, and then walking him through the village in chains, because they remembered that there was some Czech working as a postman, and therefore they decided to take dad all the way to the post office. They dragged him to the post office building and ordered him to go in and make the Czech postman walk out. Dad came there and said: ´Karel, come, we got to go.´ The man said: ´I will not go.´ There were two Czech soldiers, there, too, some guards. Obviously, they immediately escaped from the post office through the back door. This Mr. Mroček said to dad: ´Franta, lie down under the window there, we got to save ourselves somehow.´ But it was of no use, and then, probably because they were unarmed and they could not hurt anybody, they walked out and the Germans began beating them again. One German got killed during that. But, as dad said, it was them who shot him. They didn’t even notice that they shot him, because dad and the postman had no weapons, and they thus would even be able to shoot him. This made the Germans terribly furious, and the news of the incident reached the school in Kobylá, where certain Mr. Tauc was the principal. He learnt what was happening, and as dad later said, he ran to the post office and started arguing with these German Freikorps members. They had to stop and let dad and the postman get medical aid. They were all covered in blood and badly beaten, and this school principal had them transported to the hospital in Frývaldov. This teacher actually saved their lives. Father was then sent from Frývaldov to the hospital for railway workers in Olomouc, and the postman was sent to Ostrava.”
“I read what my father wrote. The poor man, his thoughts were wandering quite a bit. He was seriously injured, he suffered a head injury. According to his account, the railway station was suddenly taken over by Germans. The Germans, the members of the Sudetenland Freikorps (Sudeten German Free Corps – transl.’s note) as they were called, were everywhere, in the field and everywhere. They surrounded them from the front and from the sides. The side towards the tracks was free. Father thus told mom to run away. Mom ran on the tracks, just as she was, in her dress and apron, she didn’t even have a twenty-haller coin with her. She was running on the railroad track in the direction of Žulová, because dad probably told her that there was a train coming and that she would have to get all the way to Žulová to board it. She managed to catch the train which was evacuating Czechs from Vidnava and the Javornicko region, but she had to run all the way to Žulová. She fled just as she was, she couldn’t even take a stupid handkerchief with her.”
“He was all covered in plaster cast. It was terrible. I cannot forget it. I can still see it in front of my eyes. I remember that we waited for him when he was about to be released from hospital, when he then began walking again. In Drahotuše, where we lived right opposite the railway track, and all we could see from him was the plaster. His face and hands all in plaster, beaten up terribly. I cannot forget it.”
“We decided to move back. My husband was successful in a job interview for a position in the train station in Frývaldov, because it was to be staffed by Czech employees, and he was a railway employee in Vsetín, where he was in charge of the cargo cash desk. So it was clear that we would move back. We received a flat here, and my parents in Kobylá. And the Germans started returning thing that they had stolen. They were bringing them to us. My mom said: ´It was horrible for me when the Germans came.´ Somebody brought back only scales a pair of scales; our parents had a beautiful painting which they were very proud of, and the people returned it to them. My parents didn’t own many things. It was not a time when people would have many things at once. But the German people did bring it back. When my parents were walking through the village, the Germans would greet them: ´Topry ten.´ (Good morning in Czech with German accent – transl´s note). They wanted to say hello to them. They were greeting them, shaking hands with them. I don’t know, actually.”
“They fired him from work and he was then traveling in the area, serving at those little train stations when other employees were absent or on holiday. Then he served in Jindřichov, and one man, who had been placed there by the police because he came from the same village as my husband, came there. He came to him and said: ´Franta, wouldn’t you join us? See, I got a weapon, I got pamphlets. I’ll give you a pamphlet, go and distribute it somewhere.´ My husband replied: ´Get out, and leave me alone.´ There were two other people in the office, the assistant and the dispatcher, and my husband grabbed those pamphlets and threw them in the stove immediately, with these two men watching as witnesses. But it didn’t matter, because the man who had brought them joined the communists. And they knew it. He had been set on my husband; who knows what they had promised him for that.”
Eliška Mišunová, née Vaculíková, was born in 1925 in Ostrava, but she spent her childhood in the Jeseník region, where her father worked for the railways. The vast majority of population in this border region registered their nationality as German, and the Vaculík family was one of the few Czech families there. They had no problems with the local Germans until 1938, but this was to change at the time of the crisis preceding the Munich conference. Fearing for Eliška’s safety in the continuing national tensions, the parents sent the twelve-year-old girl and her two siblings to their relatives in the country’s interior. The parents themselves remained in their apartment in the train station in Kobylá, where they were attacked by a group of armed Freikorps members on September 22, 1938. While the mother managed to escape, her father - together with Czech postmaster Karel Mroček, were nearly beaten to death by the Freikorps members. Their lives were allegedly saved by a timely action by German school principal Mr. Tauc. The family spent the war years in the Vsetín region, where Eliška married. They all returned to the Jeseník area as early as 1945 - the parents went back to Kobylá and Eliška to Jeseník, where her husband began working for the railways. After February 1948, the Mišun family began to be disliked by the communist leaders of the local railways, because they were attending church regularly and her Eliška’s husband was persistently refusing to join the Communist Party. He thus became unwanted at work and they eventually staged a trap for him with anti-state pamphlets. Even though he immediately burned them in the presence of witnesses, he was sentenced to two years of imprisonment. Her father suffered a long-lasting trauma after the Freikorps attack, and Eliška believes that this incident eventually contributed to his suicide, which he committed as an old man at the end of the 1970s.
The former post office in Kobylá, where members of the Sudetenland Freikorps beat postmaster Karel Mroček and Eliška Mišunová's father František Vaculík on September 22, 1938
The former post office in Kobylá, where members of the Sudetenland Freikorps beat postmaster Karel Mroček and Eliška Mišunová's father František Vaculík on September 22, 1938
The train station in Kobylá nad Vidnavkou, where parents of Eliška Mišunová (Vaculíková) were attacked by members of the Sudetenland Freikorps on September 22, 1938
The train station in Kobylá nad Vidnavkou, where parents of Eliška Mišunová (Vaculíková) were attacked by members of the Sudetenland Freikorps on September 22, 1938
On the right, the former post office in Kobylá, where members of the Sudetenland Freikorps beat postmaster Karel Mroček and Eliška Mišunová's father František Vaculík on September 22, 1938
On the right, the former post office in Kobylá, where members of the Sudetenland Freikorps beat postmaster Karel Mroček and Eliška Mišunová's father František Vaculík on September 22, 1938
