It Took Me a Year to Get Rid of the Burning Smell

Dostupné v: English | Česky

In the evening of April 19, 1945, the settlement of Ploština was attacked by a special counter-partisan SS unit commanded by Werner Tutter. A Gestapo informer had managed to infiltrate the partisan group operating in this area and now, the Nazis came to punish the inhabitants of Ploština for helping the partisans. Božena Húšťová, an eyewitness of the SS action, recalls how soldiers searched the Ploština houses. First, they destroyed furniture and dishes and then they started to set the houses on fire. The informer, called Machů, walked around the village pointing at men who were helping the partisans and the soldiers tied them up. The witness recalls that the soldiers were drunk, because when looting the houses, they found a lot of homemade slivovitz. The detained men were interrogated and beaten, and some of them even had to strip down to their underwear. After a secret cache of weapons exploded in one of the houses, all the detained men were driven to the burning houses and they burned there to death. If they tried to get out of the burning houses, they were shot dead. At that day, 24 people died in Ploština, including one woman. Among the victims was also the brother of Božena Húšťová and she had to identify him at the burnt site on the following day: “I knew what he was wearing. As they were chained together, a piece of the shirt under his armpits remained intact. Otherwise I could not recognize anything. I also identified my father’s brother, because of the leather boots he was wearing. I took me a year to get rid of the burning smell.”

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Slovenské národní povstání a partyzánský odboj II.

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Božena Húšťová

Božena Húšťová, a witness of the Nazi carnage in several pastoral villages in the area of Vizovice at the end of WWII, was born on April 1st 1929 in the hamlet of Ryliska, located near the Ploština settlement. People in these remote settlements were helping the partisans, who were on the move from Slovakia to the mountains on the Moravian-Slovak border in November 1944. In the Vizovice highland and in the Beskydy Mountains, at the turn of 1944 and 1945, the 1st Czechoslovak partisan brigade of Jan Žižka, commanded by major Dajan Bajanovič Murzin, was operating. Inhabitants of these scattered villages were supplying the partisans with food, they were providing them with shelter and many even joined in their anti-Nazi activity. František Raška, Božena Húšťová's father, was one of these selfless supporters of the partisans; their cottage became the unofficial headquarters of the Ploština unit and the partisans themselves assigned him the rank of a major. In spring 1945, in the last months of the war, two Gestapo members infiltrated the partisan group, and they turned in the partisans and the citizens of Ploština and other pastoral hamlets to the Gestapo office in Zlín. On April 19th, 1945, Ploština was set on fire by the members of the counter-partisan unit "Josef" and by the SS soldiers. 24 people, coming mainly from the hamlets of Vysoké Pole and Drnovice, perished in the attack on Ploština. That day, Božena Húšťová lost her brother, who was burnt with others in a barn. Fortunately, her father and her elder sister were out of the village at the moment. The Nazis have burnt down other villages as well, and many civilians lost their lives. After the war, a monument was erected in Ploština together with a museum of anti-Nazi resistance, where Božena Húšťová works as a guide. She tells the museum's visitors about the dramatic fate of Ploština during the war, but also in the post-war period, when the settlement was rebuilt and the survivors had to cope with the loss of their loved ones and with the fact that most of the perpetrators of the Ploština tragedy were never found out.

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Ploština

Dostupné v: English | Česky

Pasekářská osada Ploština u Vizovic byla během války pro svou odlehlost častým úkrytem pro uprchlíky a partyzány. Jejich počet se zvýšil zejména na přelomu let 1944 a 1945 po porážce Slovenského národního povstání. Téměř na konci války, 19. dubna 1945, byla obec za pomoc partyzánům vypálena speciálním protipartyzánským oddílem SS vedeným Wernerem Tutterem. Zatímco partyzáni po varování spojky včas opustili osadu a skryli se v okolních lesích, zahynulo při útoku na Ploštinu 24 civilistů. Na místě vypálené vesnice byl po válce vystavěn památník a muzeum protinacistického odboje.

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Božena Húšťová, rozená Rašková