V soukolí dvou totalit. Protinacistický odboj a protikomunistická rezistence Vladimíra Garncarze a Ladislava Fojtíka
In the machine of two dictatorships. Vladimír Garncarz and Ladislav Fojtík’s anti-Nazi revolt and anti-Communist resistance

Summary/Abstract: The presented case study aims to outline the anti-Nazi revolt and anti-Communist resistance of Vladimír Garncarz and Ladislav Fojtík, two former partisans, and using comparison find common features within a broader framework of the war and postwar years in South-East and North-East Moravia. Garncarz and Fojtík’s joint journey began at the time of the Protectorate when they, together with their fathers, joined the anti-Nazi resistance in the Vsetín district, and continued at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s in the form of anti-Communist resistance. Their activity against the two totalitarian regimes included stealing of arms, sabotage and intelligence collection. After the communist coup they also started to cooperate with people with links to American and French secret services. While Garncarz carried out resistance operations in Czechoslovakia, Fojtík was trafficked to Austria with the help of Jan Vašek, a courier for the French intelligence service SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage). He was trained to use a radio transceiver in Austria and what was then West Germany and later he returned to Czechoslovakia in order to create an intelligence network and send the collected information abroad. At the beginning of 1952 the activities of the two men were uncovered and mass arrests followed. At that moment their ways parted. While Garncarz spent years in prison and remained a convinced anti-Communist for the rest of his life, Fojtík started to cooperate with the State Security (StB). StB sent him back to Austria at the end of 1952, where he was supposed to collect information on Czechoslovak émigrés with links to SDECE. However, he was soon uncovered and arrested. He managed to flee and return to Czechoslovakia before he was sentenced in 1954. Later, StB provided him with a new identity and relocated him from the Vsetín district to the Plzeň district, where he served within the “agency network” until the mid 1960s. He met a premature death in an avalanche during a mountaineering expedition in the Tatras in 1966.

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