How My Father Had to Feel

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On April 20, 1945, nineteen tortured men were brought to the wood near the village of Kyjanice. In the evening, soldiers of the Wehrmacht ended their lives with a bullet to the back of head. Then they threw their bodies into a forest hut and set it on fire. Among the murdered men were Svatava Kubíková's father and only brother. “The hut was surrounded by one meter stacks of wood and they poured gas on it, threw the bodies in and set it on fire. All of them burnt there. How my father had to feel if he still perceived something! His son next to him. He on fire and no help. After the liberation we found out they were executed there. They dug them out and brought them home. All nineteen of them fit inside just one coffin. They buried them in Tršice. My brother was seventeen and my father was forty-three. Even today I hear my mother saying: ‛If only the boy stayed here with me,’” Svatava Kubíková recalled.

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Svatava Kubíková

Svatava Kubíková, born Marková, was born in Zákřov near Olomouc in 1931. When she was 23, she witnessed the so-called Zákřov tragedy. The soldiers of 574 Cossack battalion arrested 23 men on 18 April 1945, because they had allegedly supported guerilla fighters. Two days later, 19 of them were shot and burnt to death in a shed near Kyjanice. Svatava Kubíková's father, Josef Marek, and her only brother, Drahomír Marek, were killed. After that she stayed in Zákřov with her mother, Marie, who suffered very much from the loss of her husband and son. Today she still lives in her home village.

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Kyjanice, Zákřov Grief

Available in: English | Česky

On 20 April 1945, the area of the former settlement Kyjanice was witness to the execution of nineteen men by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Most of the victims came from the small village of Zákřov. Before the execution itself, these suspected partisan supporters suffered two days of brutal torture. Many of them had broken limbs. After the execution the bodies were burnt in a forest cabin. In 1949 the memorial “Zákřov Grief” by the academic sculptor Vladimír Navrátil was unveiled at the place of the tragedy. The small crypt at the base of the statue houses the ashes of the deceased.

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How My Father Had to Feel

Svatava Kubíková