František Sedoník

* 1925

  • “We went to visit him for Christmas. Some gipsies ahead of us started fighting each other for their place in the queue. The guard took advantage of that to send us all home. There were people there who’d come all the way from Bohemia, and they’d come in vain. Everyone was looking forward to the Christmas visit, understandably. We had to go home, and we received an invitation by post to come again on Epiphany. We came there, and they told us we have to wait, that the prisoner is loading up wagons at the train station, that they have to go and get him. So they stuck us into some office, where Mum and I were supposed to wait. Suddenly, the door opened and a guard came in with a dog - he stood still and stared at us. After a while he asked me if I knew him. I said I thought I did. He was my former co-worker at Tatra, a zealous Communist who applied to be a prison guard; he was my brother’s guard. He told me that seeing that I knew him, he’d leave his dog here with me and we could talk together. He got up and left. We talked with my brother for half an hour, then they took him away again. So I also found out that this guard was one of the nastiest blokes. That was the only time it worked out.”

  • “Say, there was this one case there that one spinster - the lady was in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm, and she bought some bed linen there. She wrapped the cloth around her body and wanted to smuggle it through. The customs officers thought her suspicious, so they pulled her out of the bus and said she had to be checked over. The bus driver told the officers to quit fooling about, can’t they see she’s pregnant, couldn’t they leave her alone. The officers let her go, and after they crossed the border the driver complained: ‘Just imagine, that stupid hag, she came to me and told me she’s a spinster and how dare I say she was pregnant. I saved her from the cooler, and she takes offence.’ So that’s the kind of muddle we had on the border.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Lubina, 14.04.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 01:36:40
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

The Communist regime sent my brother to prison, then my uncle and my cousin

František Sedoník v roce 1951.JPG (historic)
František Sedoník

František Sedoník was born on 4 October 1925 in Sýkorec (Lubina from 1959, now part of Kopřivnice). During the war the Czech-only Sýkorec belonged under Reichsgau Sudetenland, and the border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia passed right behind the witness’s house. His memories thus include several incidents that occurred in connection with the local financial (customs) office. After completing school František Sedoník worked in Kopřivnice at Ringhoffer-Tatra a. s., and besides some brief interludes, he stayed in the same factory, which was renamed to Tatra National Enterprise after its nationalisation, until his retirement. In the 1950s he witnessed the arrest of his brother Josef Sedoník and later also his uncle Alois Polášek and his cousin Václav Polášek, who were sentenced to prison in Communist show trials. Fears of what might come next and of possible further persecution influenced the lives of him and other family members for many years to come.