A precious gift

During the Second World War, the father of Jiří Klimeš who had been one of the leaders of the resistance organization “Defense of Silesia” was arrested and later executed. The family was then driven out from its household by the Gestapo and spent the war in an asylum in neighboring Vlaštovičky. Jiří Klimeš was not even six years old when a group of more than three hundred prisoners fleeing from the advancing front arrived in January 1945 to Vlaštovičky. Among them were apparently many American prisoners of war. The prisoners stayed for two days in the village and Jiří Klimeš remembers that a five-year old boy brought them a piece of bread. After two days the prisoners marched to the west under the supervision of the SS men. “When they were leaving, they always had a bundle over their shoulder or something else to carry their stuff. I don’t know what they were carrying in it, probably some clothes or something like that. Some of them couldn’t carry it anymore so they just dragged it behind. They’d use planks and drag their stuff behind them on the plank or use a string to pull it. It was winter and there was plenty of snow. We stood in a cordon around the column of prisoners leaving through the village. Before that we kids were riding on sleighs so we had our sleighs with us. My mother, when she saw the misery of the prisoners, she gave the prisoners the sleighs. She just pushed it over to them. At first, they wouldn’t even believe her but made a gesture showing that they could take it. So they gladly took it”, recalls Jiří Klimeš.