A secret message
Miloslav Moulis spent nearly two years in the Amberg penitentiary during the Second World War. As a convict, he had to work in the local mine where he sometimes managed to get some information about what was happening in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As was customary, he informed the other prisoners of the news he had learned with the help of secret messages. While he was handing over one such message at the end of May 1942, he was arrested by the guards. "When I was caught by the guard, I was really scared. Although we didn’t know what they were doing to the prisoners, it was clear to us that it had to be horrible things. I was punished by having to spend three weeks in the bunker, as it was called. It was a solitary confinement, almost a dungeon. I stayed in solitary confinement for the remainder of my sentence, which was still half a year. The biggest fear I had, however, was that the warden might inform the Gestapo about it, because he would always threaten me with this", recalls Mr. Moulis. This concern – as it turned out – was well justified. Although Mr. Moulis was released from jail at Christmas 1942, the next arrest came only six months later. This time there was no trial, and Mr. Moulis was sent directly to the Buchenwald concentration camp. For many years after the war, Mr. Moulis didn’t know what led to his second arrest. He only found out many years later when he had the opportunity to take a look into his file in the State Archives in Prague. In it he found a German translation of that intercepted secret message: "28 May, 1942: Boys, the Protectorate is going through the Via Crucis again. The Reich broadcast announced today that Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated. He was mortally wounded, but that’s unfortunately all we know. The frontiers of the Protectorate were hermetically sealed and special security measures were taken across the entire country. The political consequences are not known, but I anticipate that they will be extensive and extremely painful", cites Miloslav Moulis from his message.
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Miloslav Moulis
Miloslav Moulis was born in 1921 in Prague. His father was a lawyer and worked at the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Railways. During the German occupation, his father was arrested by the Nazis (for his illegal work on the petition “Faithful We’ll Stay”) and in 1943 executed. The family lived in Pilsen since 1923. Here, Miloslav attended elementary school and then the Masaryk grammar school. The children were raised in a patriotic spirit and young Miloslav became keenly interested in public life. He wanted to become a journalist. When shortly after the occupation the students founded the association “National Movement of the Working Youth”, he became its member and for his activities associated with his membership in it, he was arrested by the Gestapo (the association lasted less than a year). Some members of the association joined the foreign resistance and those who remained in the country were arrested on May 29, 1940. Miloslav Moulis was sentenced by the People's Court to two and a half years in prison. He was released from prison at Christmas 1942, but his freedom wasn’t going to last for long as he was shortly afterwards arrested again. This time there was no more trial and he was taken straight away to the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. Fortunately, he didn’t stay there for long and was soon sent to Buchenwald, where he spent the remainder of the war. On April 11, 1945, the camp was liberated by the Americans. After the war, Mr. Moulis returned home (his mother died in 1939 but he had two brothers who lived with his aunt) and began working in the newspaper. In 1946, he moved to Prague. Since then, he has been writing about World War II, with a focus on the topic of the involvement of the youth in the resistance movement and concentration camps. In 1966, he got an offer from Ludvík Svoboda to cooperate in the writing of his memoirs. This collaboration lasted until 1969, when the group that counted three historians in total was disbanded. Until 1993, Mr. Moulis then worked on the editorial board of the National Liberation of the Association of Freedom Fighters. He’s still engaged in editorial work to this day.
