"Farmers had a habit of checking out their fields on New Year's Day. So my dad, when he went to the field, he saw footprints in the snow. He wondered what the footprints meant. He went there to look, there was a cave that had been broken out, and sandstone was had been mined there, perhaps even for the construction of the Charles Bridge. They [Operation Anthropoid paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš] were in that cave. Dad asked what they were doing there, and they said they wanted to resume sandstone mining. Dad knew it was nonsense, but somehow they made an arrangement, and Dad used to bring them food and helped them there, because after the jump, they hid the things in the garden shed of the gardener Sedláček. But later, when [Gestapo collaborator Karel] Čurda betrayed them, the first to be picked were the Moravec family. Their older son was in the British army, mother took cyanide, father probably endured, but the younger son, I don't know if it's true or not, I read it somewhere or heard it. Anyway, they then cut off the mother's head and showed it to this Aťa (Vlastimil) and he broke down and said all what he knew. Then it went swiftly, the Germans were amazingly fast. One by one they picked out all the people Gabčík and Kubiš had stayed with. And some of them must have known about Dad."
"Those 294 people [other sources say 261] were shot in the back of the head on 24 October. The room where it was taking place was camouflaged in a way that everything was white-tiled, floor was of concrete, they weighed them there, then measured them. They were playing these German hits, Lili Marlene and stuff like that. They walked around in white coats. And when they [the prisoners] came up to the measure that they had to stand under, there was a hole in the wall, and from there they were shot in the back of the head with a small-calibre pistol. The body was taken away, the floor was washed clean of blood, and it was the next one´s turn. So the timing was just three minutes apart. I never saw my parents again."
“I remember at least four things from the time when I was nearly five years old. The first: There was a washing basin in the corner and I remember that one German woman spanked me on my naked butt there. I don’t remember anything else about it, but I do remember this for sure. Another thing I remember was that there was a low podium, placed diagonally in the opposite corner of the room, the kind they have in classrooms. There was a closet and from time to time, a guy - it was impossible to tell his age, and he wore a working coat, the kind that warehouse workers wear - would come there, and he would take out a violin from that closet and he would play for us. I also remember that after lunch we always went to rest on the balcony. We looked down from that balcony and there were people who had got crippled in the war. There were men who lost their legs or arms. They wore striped pyjamas. (…) When grandpa took me home in 1945, he arrived there for me with a wagon, because trains were still not running at that time, and he asked me: ‘Svata, kommst du mit?’ I replied: ‘Ja.’ We arrived home and grandma wanted me to put on pyjamas. When I saw the striped cloth, I jumped out of the window which was on the ground floor and they had to chase me all over the village square. Grandma then had to sew a nightgown with a flower pattern for me.”
Svatopluk Bauman was born into a farmer´s family in Horoušany on 21 June 1940. It was in the area between Horoušany and Nehvizdy that paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš landed on 29 December 1941. Their task was to liquidate the acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich as part of the so-called Operation Anthropoid, organised by the exiled Czechoslovak government in London. Svatopluk‘s father, Břetislav, discovered them in an old sandstone quarry on New Year‘s Day while checkiung out the fields and brought them food. After the successful assassination of Heydrich on 27 May 1942, the Gestapo searched not only for the assassins but also for all those who had helped them. In July 1942 they arrested Svatopluk‘s father, and in August his mother, and Svatopluk was placed in the former Masaryk Homes (now Thomayer Hospital), in a German institution, where he lived until the end of the war. Both parents went through interrogations at the Gestapo headquarters in Petschek Palace, were later imprisoned in the Small Fortress of Terezín, and finally executed in the Mauthausen concentration camp on 24 October 1942. After the war, his maternal grandfather came to get Svatopluk and Svatopluk lived with his grandparents. He graduated from the Faculty of Fuel and Water Technologies and became a water company specialist technician. In 1970 he got married and later had two children.
