“I really liked it in this region, but I could only be there until I was eight. When my parents moved there from Náchod in 1948, after the First World War, all the children knew we had a secret grain cache in our house from the war, and so our fate was sealed. Because then when the paratrooper, the radio operator Jiří Potůček, was to move in with us, it was probably requested by Grandpa’s youngest daughter, who lived in Bohdašín. The paratrooper was originally supposed to have been moved on to Doubravice near Dvůr Králové, to Karel Ježek, a teacher and Sokolite, but his shelter wasn’t ready yet, so they placed him temporarily into our family, and so our fate was sealed.”
“The western resistance was being put down. The aviator František Fajtl was imprisoned during the communist regime. He had fought in England and in the Soviet Union as well... the man who imprisoned him in Mírov, certain Mr. Kohlíček, now lives in Canada. They want to bring him here, but they are not able to… he moved to Canada together with one lady from Trutnov whom I knew and he lives there.”
“When he came home, they started at him: ‘Where’s the paratrooper?’ And Dad said: ‘I don’t know about anything,’ he didn’t betray him. And they took a whip from where we had the cows, and they started thrashing him with the whip. He didn’t like that of course, so he started thinking what he should do. It was up to him how to decide, but there was nothing better to decide because he needed to cause some commotion, and he caused the commotion by tearing free of them and dashing off, and they started shooting at him. I was still in Kostelec and I didn’t hear it. They shot at him, and the first bullet to hit him probably came from the gendarme Mařan, who was the only one equipped with a carbine, a rifle, because the others who shot from pistol mightn’t have hit. So he was shot the first time at the edge of the forest where we have a little memorial now, and then he got, as they said, another five hits as he fled through the forest – which was all bloodied – and he ran all the way to the bottom of the forest and collapsed there. The first to reach him was the Kostelec gendarme, and Dad said: ‘Shoot me so I don’t betray anything!’ But the gendarme didn’t shoot him, they loaded him up into a cart because there was a farmer there with some grass in a cart. So they lay him in the grass and took him to Kostelec, but he was bleeding, and at the first house in Kostelec he bled to death and died.”
“194 people were executed there, the last ones from the Pardubice region... aunt from Kostelec came to Končiny and my dad had visited her several days before and he told her: ‘If something happens, please, take care of my children.’ He had already anticipated that it would be discovered … Aunt came to Končiny and she took us to Kostelec with her.”
“The granny who was in Bohdašín at the time of the arrests was overlooked by the Gestapo because the caretakers and some craftsmen were there at the time, so they only arrested Satran and Satranová, they took those away, and their son was at school in Kostelec. And the granny, they weren’t interested in her, they didn’t know who it was. So the granny set out and went home to Končiny. She was barefoot, it was warm, in the summer, and she stopped by her daughter’s at the edge of Kostelec to say what had happened at home – with her youngest daughter and her son-in-law, that they’d been arrested and that she was coming to give her farewells because they would probably snatch her up as well. So she said goodbye, came back to her home to Končiny, we were with her for about an hour, and we thought they’d leave her be. But the Gestapo came in an hour’s time and ordered her to go with them because she was the only one they were missing. So she said goodbye to us, kissed us on the forehead and said: ‘God protect you,’ and off she went with the Gestapo.”
“The airman František Peřina went to the West. His wife had been in a concentration camp and when he returned after the war he knew that they would persecute him. One of his friends who still worked at the airport in Pardubice informed him that they could fly to England together... They agreed that they would fly away together with his wife and that this second pilot would pick him up on a meadow near Pardubice... They managed to do that, the airplane arrived there, they threw out the spare propeller and Peřina’s wife sat in the extra space and they flew to the West. It was foggy that day and they had problems with finding their way; the only way to fly was to follow a railroad track… they eventually landed in the middle of some marshy meadow and they were lucky that they were six kilometres into the American zone. If they had landed on the other side, they would have been in the Russian zone.”
Antonín Burdych was born in 1934 and at the time of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich he was thus eight years old. Nor Antonín nor his brother Vladimír, who was four years older, were aware that their parents were members of the resistance group S212B and that they were hiding radio transmitter operator Jiří Potůček in their house. Based on information from a Czech doctor who denounced the family, the Gestapo learnt about Potůček‘s hiding place and stormed into the house on June 30, 1942. Antonín‘s father attempted to warn Potůček and he ran away from the house. The shooting did alert the paratrooper to the danger, but Antonín‘s father paid with his life for this and he died as a result of severe bleeding. Antonín‘s mother, who was watching the entire incident, suffered a heart stroke and she was not even able to part with her sons who just came home from school at this very moment. Jiří Potůček managed to shoot his way out of the surrounded house and escape. Later, the boys were only able to say good-bye to their grandmother who was not at home at the fateful moment. In spite of that, the grandmother and her husband were executed in the prison in Pardubice together with the mother of the two boys, and the same fate met their other relatives who have also assisted in hiding the paratrooper. Jiří Potůček was shot to death two days later by a Czech policeman when he was sleeping. The brothers were then brought up by their relatives. Antonín Burdych raised three sons. He worked in the company Krkonoše Furniture and he lived in Rtyně v Podkrkonoší. He inherited his cheerful and optimistic nature from his father. He died on November 12, 2024.
