“I was sent to the military forced labour camp in Svatá Dobrotivá, which was a predecessor of the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. There were only two barracks. There was a mess hall and a kitchen in one of them and the other served as a living space for sixty soldiers. The main task was to build the camp and other barracks. There was nothing, no sewage system, nothing. While there I learnt how to dig, which was something I have never done in my life. We had no water pipes there, and there was no place from which to supply water. The only way to get water there was to blast the rock, about four kilometres of solid rock. We had a pickaxe, a shovel and a ten-kilogram hammer for the task, which was really not too much. Only after we protested they called in a team of five regular soldiers with explosives, because we were not allowed to work with explosives. We could not even be entrusted with a rifle, and it was ridiculous to call us an army.”
“Slovak boys, with whom we had had normal relations thus far, began to provoke fights more and more often. During one of the fights they tore down the portrait of president Dr. Beneš from the wall. In return, we tore down the portrait of their Slovak leader Andrej Hlinka and a fight started. The result was that the principal closed down the class, and he informed us that for us, Czechs, the studies at that grammar school were over. He told us that we should consider our half-term grade certificate as a final school-leaving certificate and we should leave. We waited for two more months and then we left Slovakia and we went to our father to Jihlava. As if by coincidence, it happened on the fateful March 15, 1939. The whole family squeezed into a small train compartment and we left Slovakia without even saying good-bye to the closest friends, because they were too afraid to visit us for fear of being suspected of sympathizing with Czechs.”
“We got scared because of mom’s Jewish origin. We were afraid that they would transport the whole family, or mom and me, to Terezín, or to some other concentration camp. My father consulted a good lawyer, who advised him to formally divorce his wife. They thus divorced after their wonderful twenty years of marriage. Father therefore did not have to prove that his wife and my mother was of Aryan origin. We rather moved to an isolated place by the forest. It was a paradoxical situation, because the house belonged to one older German woman, who provided one small underground room for us which had been used as an open fire kitchen. There were many cockroaches there.”
“On August 29, 1944 the authorities ordered me to do forced labour in the factory in Stará Hůra near Jihlava. In a month I was trained as a milling machine operator and I operated a turning lathe for aircraft parts. One day I accidentally dropped a measuring instrument during the work. I was accused of sabotage and I was taken to the Gestapo in Jihlava. I directly experienced a brutal interrogation there. I got slapped and kicked so many times that I could not count it. I had to hold a sheet of paper against the wall with the tip of my nose and I saw how they beat another guy who dropped the paper. Then they placed me in a dungeon which was the size one metre and a half by one metre and a half, and I had to stand there. When my knees collapsed, I was splashed with sewage water in my face.”
Jaroslav Makrot was born May 30, 1926 in Humenné in Slovakia. His father worked for the railway company and his mother, who was of Jewish origin, was a housewife. Jaroslav studied grammar school, but the family had to leave the Slovak territory after the declaration of the Slovak State. They moved to Jihlava where Jaroslav‘s father found employment. After the implementation of anti-Jewish laws his father formally divorced Jaroslav‘s mother. When the situation of the Jews in the Protectorate began to grow worse, the family moved to the countryside to the village Rantířov near Jihlava. They found a room to rent in an isolated place where it was easier for his mother to go unnoticed. Jaroslav began studying a trade academy in Jihlava. Nobody knew of his half-Jewish origin. In 1944 he was sent to do forced labour in an aircraft parts factory. He was later interrogated by the Gestapo because they suspected him of sabotage. Jaroslav spent the end of the war in Jihlava and he became involved in the revolutionary movement there: he served as a messenger to partisans. After the liberation he completed his studies at the trade academy and he continued to pursue this profession. In 1949 he was fired from his job for being allegedly disloyal to the new political regime, and when he did his military service he was assigned to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. In the 1950s he and his wife moved to western Bohemia. Jaroslav Makrot died on 11 November 2019.
