Písek, Czech Republic: Romani community members Jan Kuča and Lukáš Bandy save a little girl from drowning in a river

A five-year-old girl riding a bicycle somehow left the footpath she was on and sailed into the Otava River. The girl began to drown immediately.

Fortunately, Jan Kuča and Lukáš Bandy were also walking by and did not hesitate to jump into the river to save her. “We’d just planned to go for a beer because it was our day off. The five-year-old girl rode past us on her bike right then,” Bandy told news server Romea.cz about the dramatic event.

If the pair hadn’t responded so quickly, it would have been difficult to estimate where exactly the girl ended up in the river. “She was riding downhill, and suddenly she sailed off of the path in front of the footbridge straight into the Otava. She immediately started making noise beneath the surface. Her parents were about 40 or 50 meters away from the place where it happened. We were just two meters away from her, fortunately. It was a matter of seconds,” said Bandy, a 28-year-old Romani man who was born in Slovakia and moved to the Czech Republic for work.

He immediately alerted his brother-in-law, Jan Kuča, who also did not hesitate to jump into the river to rescue the little girl. “I pulled her up after about three or four seconds, she was incredibly frightened. I’ll never forget her eyes full of fear,” Kuča, who is also 28 and a native of Písek, told news server Romea.cz

“The water wasn’t deep to me, it was a little more than a meter deep, but for a little girl it could have been fatal, the only part of her we could see was her little hand. There was also a lot of mud,” described Kuča, who immediately passed the terrified girl to his brother-in-law Bandy, who helped her back onto the riverbank.

Kuča also decided to retrieve the bicycle, which had dragged the girl down to the river bottom immediately. Her parents ran onto the scene, out of their minds with fear, but she was no longer endangered; after looking her over quickly, they repeatedly thanked her rescuers.

The parents offered both gentlemen a financial reward for rescuing their child. Both of them strenuously refused to accept it.

“One does not accept money for saving a life, the Lord God would punish us for that, one really does not do such a thing,” Kuča decisively told news server Romea.cz. He himself is the father of two children of the same age and is all the more aware of the misfortune the family could have experienced.

“We didn’t call an ambulance, there was no time, we just immediately jumped into the water,” the gentlemen told Romea.cz, adding that the parents decided to take their daughter to the doctor. “Anybody would instinctually rescue a child,” Kuča believes, and Bandy agreed, adding: “If she were underwater just a moment longer, I don’t even want to think about what could have happened.”

Bandy said he was glad everything ultimately turned out for the best. Because neither of them took the contact information of her parents, they regret not having any news about how the little girl is doing now, so they have written to the City of Písek Facebook group and hope the girl’s parents will contact them through social media.