"It was terrible. I was nineteen years old and we had this group of friends where we went to the countryside and played sports and we were... We hitchhiked and we were in Slovakia in the Tatras and we were supposed to come back on the twenty-first of August. I don't know why, but we were coming back a day earlier and we hitchhiked again. And we saw convoys of soldiers on the way, but because we didn't think anything of what happened after that, we went back home. I went to sleep, but early in the morning, it was still almost twilight, I was awakened by the roar of the planes. So I turned on, it was a radio on wire then, and there just, when I hear the archive records today, I still have tears in my eyes."
"In 1915 he was given the task of photographing the executions of Montenegrins and Serbs and of course he wanted this cruel event to be preserved for future history, so he managed to keep some of the negatives despite the threat of death, but the question arose how to transport the negatives home, because if they were found in his possession, he would of course be shot immediately. Accidentally, an order was issued to send fifty men to the hundred mountain hunters. So Grandpa immediately volunteered and that very day they actually left for Terezín. And there he managed to get these documents home very easily."
"Of course, there were military exercises going on there, and his rebellious nature was already manifested there, when he refused to follow nonsensical orders. For example, once they brought him muddy shoes of an officer to clean them. He refused, of course, and turned himself in for a report the next day. And then there was supposed to be an oath, and again he reported himself, saying that he would not say the oath, and these refusals of orders always had some consequences for him, of course, but in the end it came to the point that he merely stepped out of line but did not say the oath."
Karel Podlipný (1892-1973) was a Czech photographer and antimilitarist whose life is closely linked to the horrors of the First World War. As a young man he enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army and was sent to Sarajevo, where he witnessed historical events - from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand d’Este to the bloody massacres in the Balkans. Thanks to his profession as a photographer, he escaped direct combat but was forced to document the executions and wartime atrocities. Yet he risked his life smuggling banned images as proof of the senselessness of war. Podlipný’s rebellious nature was evident from his youth - he refused to take the military oath. He spent time in prison for his defiance of authority, yet was eventually sent to the front in Albania. He met the assassin Gavrilo Princip in person and spoke with him briefly during his imprisonment in Terezín. After the war, he returned to civilian life and wrote his memoirs in a comprehensive diary, The Antimilitarist, which is a valuable testament to his times. The story of Karel Podlipný was told to Memory of Nations by his granddaughter Zora Janovcová (6 May 1949), who inherited her grandfather’s uncompromising view of the world. She graduated from Brno secondary school of general education in 1968. A few months later she witnessed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. A year later, on 21 August 1969, she took part in a brutally suppressed protest in Brno, where she was attacked by a police officer and narrowly escaped arrest. After graduating from secondary school, she completed a two-year follow-up course and, in addition, a distance pedagogical school with a focus on kindergarten - she worked in this field until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. In the 1990s, she completed her education by obtaining a degree and diploma at the Faculty of Education in Brno, where she studied special pedagogy and then successfully pursued speech therapy. At the time of the interview, Zora Janovcová was living in Zlín.
Execution of Serbs and Montenegrins - World War I - this is how the photograph was in the window, which aroused the dislike of the German inhabitants of Brno at the time
Execution of Serbs and Montenegrins - World War I - this is how the photograph was in the window, which aroused the dislike of the German inhabitants of Brno at the time
