Jaroslav Bošek

* 1942

  • "We had to wear the masks and stay in the room where the tear gas was, and anyone who had the wrong mask, or the wrong mask on, their eyes would burn. The boss, the commander, recognized that right away, so he punished him. That's how it was in the army. There were some of those officers, there were some, it was terrible, trying to explain to us about these people, what kind of people they were, the Germans, and the Americans, how bad they were, and all this. Well, it was terrible, the head didn't take this, but you had to listen to it, that was the worst."

  • "There he passed them and it was inland. And it, when there's a penetration inland, they were shooting green flares. When it was abroad they shot red, and when it was at night they shot a parachute still, it illuminated the whole countryside that one could see. I can't remember now which company it was, so we had to go in there and do a swarm. Well, we came up behind Vojtanov. Well, and the meadow was big, there were haystacks. Well, you had to look at every haystack. And there were maybe a hundred of us in that swarm. Well, and there about a hundred yards from us they found him in that haystack."

  • "We were going to work and the bus was going from the station to work. So we got on, we didn't know much about the invasion yet. And we got to work, we got off and there, I don't know the number of Russian soldiers and everybody went with us with their machine gun. They went with us all the way to the dressing room, from the dressing room to the workplace and they kept an eye on us all day, what we were doing, so that there wouldn't be any sabotage. That was the experience. And it wasn't so easy when you could see him behind you and you didn't know what he could do."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Plzeň, 12.05.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 53:01
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The worst part was listening to the officers talk

Jaroslav Bošek in the army
Jaroslav Bošek in the army
zdroj: archive of a witness

Jaroslav Bošek was born on 6 September 1942 in the village of Třebýcina near Klatovy. He started school in Plzeň and due to his family‘s poor grades he could not go to high school. He got an apprenticeship and worked in a factory producing locomotives. In the 1960s he did military service with the Border Guard near Cheb. After the Velvet Revolution, he started his own business and from 2006 to the present (2021) he was working as a janitor in Pilsen.