František Vlček

"My parents, of course, heard the shooting from the clearings. Being a Ploština girl, my mum was obviously worried hearing the shooting and shouting. The people were screaming. They chained them up - 24, 25, 27 men - then drove them into a barn, doused it with petrol and set it on fire. 24 people burned alive and three who tried to escape were shot on the run. Of course you could hear it, it's about three and a half kilometres. When it all died down - it's not visible from here - there was no more Ploština to see. When the shooting had stopped, they took our youngest sister to the neighbors and ne, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, went with my parents over two hills to Ploština. My parents were still trying to save something and I as a boy was running around. When a rafter fell off one of the buildings, it landed on me - on my head. It pinned me to the ground and the burning truss burned me here. When my parents found me, I had terrible burns on my head - I have scars here. The problem was also that there was nothing to treat it properly with, and it got infected. Then I lay on my belly for three months and cried - I only know this from stories, the entire Ploština story."

"I'm a war victim, so to speak, because I have deep scars from that time here on my head. See, when the Germans were retreating at the end of the war, they still wanted to take as much revenge as possible on those who had helped the partisans. There were also two traitors in the Ploština unit - Baťa and Machů, executed after the war, who had told the Gestapo in Vsetín what was going on. So on 19 April 1945, the Germans marched on Ploština in three direction. The Gestapo from Zlín came from Újezd, the SS unit - I think it was a special one from Vizovice that stayed at the castle - came from Pozděchov, and the Wehrschutz from Slavičín and Vrbětice came here from Tichov. But since they were the closest and the Gestapo had got delayed in Újezd (they questioned and then shot a family and lost time), and the SS from Pozděchov lost their way once again, a guard unit from Zbrojovka in Vrbětice was the first to arrive. Fortunately for our family, there was one among them, probably from the Sudetenland, I don't know, who spoke a little broken Czech. Our family - the Rumans - were planting potatoes like three hundred metres from the house where they couldn't see Ploština directly. At 11 pr 12 o'clock, they went home for lunch. As they were finishing their lunch, a Wehrschutz man in uniform burst in and yelled, 'Pack up immediately and run! It's all going to be burned here!' Of course they saw it was bad and they ran. My grandfather still wanted to save something, so he jumped into the attic, put a sack of grain over his shoulder - and the Wehrschutz guy kicked him in the ass, pardon my language. As grandpa he fell, he shouted at him: 'Du alter Narr! Willst du hier wegen eines Sacks Getreide umkommen?!' So grandpa survived. It was fortunate that the Wehrschutz man was already a bit... he wasn't just an SS man, so he saved our family."