Amicable help

František Šedivý helped two fugitives to cross the border to Bavaria in the fall of 1948 and the spring of 1949. For security reasons, he didn’t know their names and they didn’t know his. The first crossing was an older man, probably an army officer with his wife. The second crossing was far more complicated. This time it was a young woman, perhaps the widow of an intelligence officer, and her two small children. “She was carrying one child and I was carrying the other one. The journey lasted for nearly five hours and then I had to walk back the same distance and return before daylight, quietly to my home,” František Šedivý recalled. Šedivý knew Šumava only from his several previous trips that he had made in the summer of 1948. He set out from the road from Srní and then walked the hillside slope of the Poledník. He had never crossed the border himself. He only accompanied the fugitives within sight of the border stones. He doesn’t consider his help with the border crossings an important episode of his life, just a kind of an amicable assistance. More important were his other resistance activities, for which he was also convicted. The StB had never learned about his help with the border crossings.