“That blow caused one of my hands to come loose from the handcuffs, I don't even know how. So I had my right hand out of the handcuffs, and the other, my left hand, was still in the handcuffs. When the bomb fell on the yard, an explosion occurred in the form of a funnel. When that happens, an airless space is created, and behind the airless space, everything flies out. So all the windows and doors were broken inwards behind that bomb. And it happened to the door of our cell as well. It got broken, and I could break out the debris from the door with my right hand. That way we got out of there with Antonín Kníř, who was also sentenced there with me and is now a major official in Škoda in Pilsen. We quickly ran to the middle, where there was a guards' desk, on which we knew they kept the keys and keys to the cells and our handcuffs. And with those, we unlocked each other's handcuffs and could finally feel like liberated people. And we had one more strange thing that happened only on our arm, it was arm C. Those arms are A, B, C, and D, they form a cross, and ours was arm C. But we were wearing convict clothes, which everyone would recognize. Those were the convict's clothes, which would always be torn off of one convict and given to another one.”
“That's why during all the sleepless nights and days when a convict awaits the end of his life, we always longingly listened to the hum of the engines when the Western powers were bombarding and when our only hope rose from there. You wouldn't believe, as I found out from observing my fellow sufferers, how one begins to cling to life after the death sentence. Amazingly cling to life. And for some people, the horror before the end of life led to madness. Somehow, fate had mercy on them, and they went insane before the execution, which was a real blessing because this way they somehow got out of that horror after all. Our liberation– it happened to all of us condemned, that we were liberated by the well-known bombing of Dresden on the night of the 13th to the 14th and from the 14th to the 15th of February 1945. It had already been 64 days after my death sentence. I don't remember ever falling asleep in those 64 days. Maybe I did without knowing it, but I truly don't remember ever having the experience of falling asleep. But I persevered.”
Jan Maryška was born on May 18, 1890. He graduated from a teachers‘ institute and devoted himself to the teaching profession all his life. After the First World War, where he fought in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army, he took up his first post at the Czech-German school in Český Krumlov. In 1930, he moved to Duchcov in North Bohemia, where he worked as a district school inspector. At the time of dramatically deteriorating relations between the Czechs and Germans in the border area, he was also one of the councillors of the Duchcov district office. Two days before the signing of the Munich Agreement, he had to leave Duchcov in a hurry and after the occupation of the Sudetenland, he was threatened with arrest due to his anti-Nazi attitude. He moved to Prague with his wife and four small children, where he received an offer to work at the Ministry of Education. Shortly after the German occupation, he joined the resistance as part of the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Petition Committee Věrni zůstaneme. In the fall of 1942, he was arrested for resistance activities. He was imprisoned in Pankrác, in the Small Fortress in Terezín and in Gollnów prison. In December 1944, he was transferred to Dresden, where a trial was held, and Jan Maryška was sentenced to death. He waited for the execution of the sentence in the Dresden prison until February 15, 1945. On that day the prison building was so damaged by bombing that he managed to escape under dramatic circumstances. He hid until the end of the war and returned to Prague at the beginning of The Prague uprising. He witnessed the heated atmosphere of the war’s end in Prague. He returned immediately to the Ministry of Education on May 9, where he took over the leadership of the Revolutionary National Committee. He remained working at the ministry in his original post until his retirement. He was disappointed by the post-war development in Czechoslovakia, which culminated in the communist coup in February 1948 and thus lost all hopes for the democratic direction of the country, for whose freedom he was willing to die. He was twice married and twice widowed and raised four children. He died in august 1976, his family kept the unique recording of his escape from Dresden for many years.
