A fountain pen with his name engraved on it
In 1946, Jan Janků re-established the scout organization in Hanušovice and the union of friends of the Junák. At the same time he became a leader of one of the troops. In the Scout, he got to know Alois Valenta, also a leader of one of the troops. Valenta was also a member of the anti-communist resistance group "Světlana" that operated in the region of Moravia. "There were seven members of Světlana living in Hanušovice. Lojza Valenti was nineteen years old, working as a road-mender, when I lent him my fountain pen. Back then, having a fountain pen was a luxury. In those days, it was in vogue to engrave your name on the pen, so I did that as well." Světlana was infiltrated by StB agents who lured Valenta into Valašské kloubouky. "They shot Lojza there. They allegedly emptied the whole magazine into him. Then they dragged him by his feet to the armory. I didn't know about it at that time." The secret police carried out a search at the place where Vlenta was killed, and the pen with Mr. Janků's name was found. Mr. Janků managed to evade the first arrest attempt, but then the secret police set a trap for him. "I had no idea what had happened to Valenta. I got a letter from him, that had been written by the StB, inviting me to visit him. On May 29, 1949, a car with a diplomatic license plate and a car of the International Red Cross were waiting for me. Lola Doležalová, the lover of Ruda Stránský – we used to call him redhead – was supposed to lure me into the trap. She was an agent of the StB. She let me into the car and told me that she'd take me across the border. That was my last moment of freedom. Then I got beaten up in Jihlava, after which they took me to the town of Uherské Hradiště." The trials with the arrested members of the group lasted for two years and involved over four hundred people. Jan Janků feared that he would get the death penalty. In 1950, after approximately one year of waiting in Uherské Hradiště, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
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The Světlana resistance organization
The so-called "Světlana" group, one of the largest anti-resistance organizations in Czechoslovakia, is only being spoken about in recent years. Its activities still haven't been sufficiently explored. Its task was to create individual resistance groups involved primarily in the gathering of intelligence information, the production and dissemination of illegal material, obtaining weapons or helping people to escape from the country. The core group consisted of guerrillas from Wallachia, but people from other parts of Moravia were involved as well, for example from the region of Brno, Vyškov, Vsetín and the Austrian border. One of the leading figures in the group was Josef Vávra called "old man" who, after World War II, co-founded the Association of Czech partisans. One of Vávra's biggest achievements was the establishment of a guerilla self-help group working in Zlín, called Partkol. This production collective was supposed to become a kind of an economic and social base for the Moravian guerrillas. Vávra himself took up the post of chairman and some of the major posts in the collective were taken up by Vávra's closest associates. His popularity among Moravian guerrillas continued to grow, but for the "higher power", he was getting uncomfortable. He was gradually ousted from positions of power in the central guerrilla organs and he eventually found himself in isolation. During the February events, he made one last unsuccessful attempt to establish the Zlín Regional Action Committee of the SČP and to become its chairman, but he was subsequently deprived of all of his remaining positions, including the presidency in the Partkol, and excluded from the SČP. In due time he decided to leave to France. He entrusted Rudolf Lenhard with the leadership of the guerrilla resistance. In September 1948, he urged Lenhard and his faithful in a letter to set up an illegal organization named after his daughter, Světlana. The group gradually expanded. In 1949, however, it was infiltrated by agents of the secret police. Since March 1949 to May 1950, the secret state police arrested over 400 people in the Moravian-Slovak borderlands, but also in southern and central Moravia. The prosecutor's office along with investigators from the State Police created sixteen resistance groups of the members of the Světlana organization and tried them since April 1952 over the course of two years in altogether sixteen processes. 283 people were sentenced to high prison sentences. Overall, the state court handed out sixteen death sentences, thirteen of which were executed. Information about the Světlana group has been published on the website of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in Michaela Lišková's thesis or in an article on the website protikomunisticke.misto.cz.
