“At the end of the war, there was shooting in our town. I remember this story from the neighbouring village. An old woman bumped into a dead German. He had nice shoes so she took them off, said a prayer for him, took the shoes on her shoulders and went away. People acted in various ways. I always felt the Germans were our enemies. Dead German, good German, that was the motto.”
“My dad was a well-known communist, a supporter of Russia. Those who made the jump were Ukrainians, Russians. They arrived at the time of rape-plant harvest. A Russian in military uniform appeared among the people and they said: ‘Grof, he knows Russian.’ Before that, I was stealing wood in the forest. I slept in the room and my dad woke me up. I went out and there was this huge guy in a military uniform: ‘Zdravstvuj!’, he said. It was a rather informal meeting.”
“Those girls of ours produced a number of wasters. They asked to boys to mark them. It was night shift, machines were running, the workroom was empty – that went single-shift – and Jarda took those wasters which were supposed to be scrapped and marked them as good. But sometimes he overdid it and then when they put it together at the front, it would fire in the air. The arm factory administrator then threatened to have us hanged.”
Shortly after the war we were guarding the Germans. When things settled down, the Russians arrived and the Czech policemen were no longer needed. We then guarded the quislings in Jáchymov. When the minister grew tired of this, he sold us cheaply a 125 ccm motorbike from the headquarters.”
Jaroslav Grof was born on the 23rd of March, 1921 in Tasovice near Chrudim. His father lived through the whole of World War I as a captive in Russia from where he returned with knowledge of Russian and a affection towards the communist ideas and the workers‘ movement. Before the outburst of World War II, Jaroslav took a military course with the Defense Brigade of the Czechoslovak Motorists. During the war, he forcibly worked in an arms factory manufacturing grenade parts. At the end of the war, he and his father distributed weapons to the Russian partisans. As a conscript, Jaroslav participated in armed clashes with the Ukrainian resistance army of Stepan Bandera. He also served in an emergency unit which was later transformed into the Public Security, a regular police force. Within it, he became the head of the school of National Security Corps.
