Jana Chalupová

* 1939

  • “Grandpa then said that Mr. Salač could no longer be in the attic upstairs. When there were no people in the backyard, he and Salač dug a hole with a little window behind the cellar. It was so small that you could squeeze in only if you were lying down. It was a tiny room where Mr. Salač spent two years.”

  • “Written in Jiřice during the German occupation. In these years there was great shortage of flour, bread, meat and meat products. Josef Salač, a butcher from Kostelec nad Labem, and others, like Bohuslav Kaper, a miller from Lobkovice, and butcher Čejka from Kostelec, were selling, and above all, delivering, foodstuffs to the families of people who had been arrested. They were arrested because they were good Czechs and patriots and because they hated Germans. Most of them were arrested when somebody informed upon them, and especially the butchers were imprisoned in the Petschek Palace. What they were doing to them there was enough. It is still not known who had turned them in. When they caught all of them, the court trial began. Čejka was a coward and the Germans who interrogated him noticed this, and he thus sided with them during the interrogations. They were giving him cigarettes and he was telling them what he knew. But he didn’t know everything. Above all, he didn’t know where the cattle was being slaughtered, and to whom the meat was being sent. Salač was a brave man. He had friends and sometimes he was even slaughtering cattle outside, somewhere on a out-of-the-way meadow. He was thus causing damage to Germans and helping our people wherever he could.”

  • “At the time when he learnt that there would be a court trial, he asked my grandpa whether he would not take him out of the Avia factory in a lorry. Grandpa got on his bike and he rode to the factory and he walked by the fence trying to see him there. He saw him and he yelled at him. Mr. Salač approached the fence and grandpa told him: ‘Pepík, the door of our house is always open for you. It is up to you how you get out of here. But do it smartly, please.´ As we know from the documents which I have read as well as from Mr. Salač’s narrative, he did not address people who knew grandpa, but he turned for help to certain Mr. Horní, who was going to the factory by car as well, and he asked him whether he would be willing to take him out, allegedly because he wanted to buy a furniture polish for some warden. A warden wanted to get some polish. Mr. Horní replied that he would, but that he would at first need to make a phone call and ask whether he would be ordered to go there. He went to the phone, the weather was rainy and cloudy, and Mr. Salač meanwhile grabbed a paper, soaked it in a puddle with sand, and he covered the windows and lay down under the dashboard in the lorry. Mr. Horní came to the lorry and said: ‘Let’s go!’ They passed through the gate, and since it was raining, the SS men just quickly peeked into the back of the car. They also looked inside Mr. Horní’s cabin, but they didn’t see anything and they said: ‘Go.’ Mr. Salač was thus taken out of the factory.”

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    Kostelec nad Labem, byt pamětnice, 11.04.2015

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It is up to you how you get out of here. But do it smartly, please.

Svatební foto.jpg (historic)
Jana Chalupová
zdroj: Sběrač Karel Kužel

Jana Chalupová was born January 14, 1939 in Nový Bydžov. She completed grammar school and then she studied mathematics and physics at the Pedagogical Faculty in Ústí nad Labem. In 1962 she met her husband-to-be and they married a year later. After their wedding she learnt that her husband‘s parents Anna Chalupová and Josef Chalupa had been hiding escaped prisoner Josef Salač for two and a half years during WWII in the period of the terror which followed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Salač was a butcher from Kostelec nad Labem who was helping to supply food to families of imprisoned members of the Sokol organization during the Protectorate. After the assassination of Heydrich Salač got imprisoned and thanks to coincidence he managed to escape and subsequently reach Mr. Chalupa‘s family in Jiřice where he was then hiding until the end of the war.