During the Prague Uprising in 1945, Jaromír Klika became a commander of the 4th company of the Intelligence Brigade (Zpravodajská brigáda). At that time, Prague was being bombed. By circumstance Jaromír Klika found himself alone in the riding hall of the Jiří z Poděbrad Barracks, guarding a large…
During the Prague uprising Ota Rambousek managed to get to the building of Czech Radio from Balbínová Street. In the chaos of revolution he got two suitcases full of grenades that were given to him, more or less willingly, by soldiers of Wehrmacht in a nearby Karlovo Square. The gun battles were …
In 1943 Miloš Knorr became an officer of 43rd British Regiment. He and his unit operated in the second invasive wave in Normandy in June 1944: “When we sailed from England through the Channel, the northern part of France had been already occupied by the Allied troops, so we went by a big st…
During the Second World War, there was a labour concentration camp affiliated to Kukla mine in Oslavany. Among the prisoners who were interned here for forced labour was also a Czech architect of German-Jewish origin named Pavel Spielmann. His son Petr and wife Leopoldina were among those, who…
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…
On 18 June 1942, the Gestapo came to Dolní Vilémovice to arrest the close relatives of Jan Kubiš, one of the assassins of Reichsprotektor R. Heydrich. Alois Denemarek, a neighbor and friend of Jan Kubiš, remembers: “At the time, we had the paratrooper, František Pospíšil, concealed in our home – …
In May 1945, Felix Kolmer escaped from the labour camp in Friedland. Together with some other prisoners, he managed to get to Choceň, where they impatiently waited for the moment they would be able to go home by train. Felix Kolmer wanted to join a unit which was guarding the train station in …
Eva Novotná comes from a mixed Czech-German marriage which was quite unusual in Pec pod Sněžkou according to her recollections. When the expulsion of Sudeten Germans had started after the war, her mother, (who was of German origin), was not included because she had accepted Czech citizenship be…
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 r…
Marie Slezáková was linked to members of the resistance group Světlana. In May 1949, she visited her sister in Božice. Her husband provided financial assistance to the resistance group, and he was hiding the resistance fighter Antonín Daněk at his place. "There was just Tonda Daněk and I in the h…
Kveta Pěničková recalls the stories she had been told by her life partner Hans Bayer, about what he witnessed as a German from the Sudetenland shortly after the war, when the notorious Revolutionary Guards arrived in the Bohemian Forest: “They came to terrorize the population of Bučina. They had …
The dream of every group of little children is to have their own clubhouse. In the town of Nymburk, there was a little group of Scouts during the war years united around Oskar, whose true name was Otokar Randák. Their dream of a clubhouse came true. This little group of twelve Scouts could use a …