“We worked twelve-hour shifts. Whether it was summer or winter, we had to get up at half past three every day. Our week lasted a fortnight. Once in a fortnight they led us to showers to wash. We were like skeletons covered with skin. Every morning we had a roll call at the Appelplatz. Headcount in the barrack blocks was checked, subtracting those who had died the previous night. The commander of the work commandos, a pensioner whom we nicknamed Šavlička, then ordered: ´Kolon weisse antreten.´ Everybody started running. There were aluminum pots with watery soup and boxes with rations of some three hundred grams of bread per person. Each of us struggled to get into some commando. When we arrived to the camp with the transport in September, people who had some technical skills were selected first. They were then being taken for work in the shipyards somewhere on the outskirts of Dessau, the place was called Dessau-Rosslau. It was some village or suburb. They were working in the shipyards. We, who were the educated ones, were taken to the airfield of the Junkers factory. We were being transported there in trucks, sitting under the tarpaulin in the back. Some of us were transported by buses, which ran on wood gas. We were going to work and working there from six a.m. to six p.m. There was a thirty-minute break for snack, and another thirty-minute break at noon for lunch when we ate that watery soup. The workplace at the airfield was nicknamed Friedhof – a cemetery. That’s what the working conditions were like. We were ordered to carry plough soil onto to a sandy ground, and this soil was being brought there by another work group from the Betz company, who were transferring it from railroad trucks to wagons.”
“After the entry of the Soviet army, at the end of the school year there was a meeting of grammar school principals, and I had a lecture about the education of the young generation under this new situation. In my lecture I voiced my opinion and I already knew that it would ruin me. I said that Gottwald had betrayed his agenda of national and democratic revolution and that he adopted an entirely different view on socialism, and that socialist politics was nothing else but Herbartism dyed in red. Herbart was a well-known German theoretician in the field of pedagogy. I think that I said even more. I said that we cannot order someone to love something, that such thing was not possible. And also that there was a difference in the welcome we gave to the Russians in 1945 and in 1968. To make a long story short, the regional board of education liked my speech, and they copied it and they sent it to all grammar schools. Naturally, after the purges that had already taken place, this made matters even worse for me. I had to leave the school.”
“While we were in the Junkers factory, the bombardment would occur even during the day. We were not allowed to go to the shelter. We would run away from the camp along the air strip in our wooden clogs, which we wore all the time, in summer and in winter, and we would hide in a thin pine forest and wait there for the air raid to be over. There were ten of us, and we only had one foreman, a German, who would pick us up in the morning with a car, and then bring us back at six in the evening. The bomb-bays of the bomber planes were opening above our heads. But we knew that a falling bomb had a parabolic trajectory, and that if we ran towards the attacking planes, the bombs would explode behind our backs. But still we found ourselves in situations when you thought that Death was grabbing your hand.”
“Kopecký was executed on October 8, 1943 after he had been sentenced by the people’s court in Dresden. I insist that it was his uncle who helped to put his head under the guillotine. I was awaiting my interrogation in the hallway, and the door to the office of the prison commander Körber was open, and the Aschenbrenner brothers were just interrogating Oliva in there. Oliva was the uncle of Jarek Kopecký. In my opinion, what Oliva told them was pure nonsense. He blamed it all on his nephew Jarek: all the things he was doing in Svojanov, not only distributing pamphlets, but also organizing it all and what not. I thought: If only I could, I would jump in there and strangle that man, because it was obvious to me that Mr. Oliva’s testimony would not cause anything good.”
“When Dessau was bombed in the evening of March 7, 1945, they didn’t even take us into that shelter tunnel anymore. It was made of concrete plates and it could protect you only against shrapnel, and this was going on every night. The wardens always had to make us get out of the barrack blocks, run to the shelter, and then back again. Later they stopped doing it. The air raid began and we were locked inside the barracks. We eventually managed to get out from the building, which was already on fire. The second wave of bombers dropped thousands of incendiary bombs, and a bunch of them exploded over the railway station area where we were. The bombs were about this size, hexagonal, they had steel fins at the end, and they exploded immediately upon impact. I think they must have been filled with some aluminum and magnesium mixture, because they were able to melt even iron. One of these incendiary fragments exploded right under my bed, and it caught fire. They guys went to break open the locked door. They eventually managed to break the door open, but at the expense of Běhounek’s bruised ribs, because the poor guy went first and everybody else was pressing against him from the back. Other guys were throwing sand over my bed and trying to put down the fire this way. I broke apart a chair and I smashed the window open, or at least the glass, because there were window-shutters over the glass, and we needed to get some air in order not to suffocate. Through the opening in the window we could see that the city was on fire and so was our camp. The wardens had run away and left us there. Many of our friends have burnt to death there. We tore apart the wire fence and the second fence. We crawled under the fence to escape from the barracks which were on fire, and we could see that there was a ploughed up field and beyond it there was the residential area Alten, which was also burning. I could hear some woman wailing there. In my wooden clogs I ran there and the woman was standing there and lamenting, because her children were inside the house which was on fire. I thought of nothing else but saving them. I went into that house and carried her children out of the bedroom.”
“We, the students of the grammar school, tried to live in the spirit of resistance. The reason was that the Gestapo arrived to our grammar school on September 1, 1939, just before eight o’clock. They went inside the building and in a short while they led out the school principal Jirkovský. They took him with them, and Jirkovský returned only after the war, from Buchenwald. He was arrested as one of the hostages. At that time, the school caretaker was certain Mr. Vaněk. He had served as a legionnaire in Russia. He would never let us inside the building earlier, no matter if it rained or if it was freezing. He would only open the door at seven forty-five. Till that time we had to wait outside in rain and cold. And so we could see the Gestapo carrying Mr. Jirkovský away, and it naturally left a deep impact on our lives.”
PhDr. Jaroslav Petr was born in 1923 in Polička. Through his friend Jaroslav Kopecký he joined the student resistance movement in Polička, where he was helping with printing and distribution of anti-Nazi pamphlets. On June 28, 1942 he was arrested and transported to the Gestapo office in Pardubice. Jaroslav Kopecký was executed on October 8, 1943. Jaroslav Petr was held in Nazi imprisonment camps until the end of the war. He was imprisoned in the prisons in Pardubice, Little Fortress in Terezín, Dresden, Litoměřice, Grieb and Dessau. While in Grieb and Dessau he was working for the Junkers-Werke factory. He was almost killed several times during the Allied bombing at the end of the war.
He witnessed the massive bombing of Dessau on March 7, 1945, when the city was basically annihilated. After his release and an arduous journey of several hundred kilometres he eventually arrived home. After the war he became a teacher and when he completed the required additional education, he became a school principal. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968 he delivered a speech at a meeting of school principals in which he condemned this invasion, and he eventually lost his job in school as a result. Later he was working as a clinical psychologist in the alcohol addiction rehabilitation clinic in Kroměříž. Today he lives in Bystré near Polička. Jaroslav Petr died on 19 January 2019.
July 1942 - Jaroslav Petr one month after his graduation, and one month before his carefree youth ended. For contacts and cooperation with a resistance organization he was arrested by the Gestapo at the end of August of the same year.
July 1942 - Jaroslav Petr one month after his graduation, and one month before his carefree youth ended. For contacts and cooperation with a resistance organization he was arrested by the Gestapo at the end of August of the same year.
Photograph taken on May 17, 1941. Grammar school flying airplane models. From left to right: Jan Hendrych, Jaroslav Petr, Vladimír Kopřiva and Vladimír Kučera, who later became the senior of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren
Photograph taken on May 17, 1941. Grammar school flying airplane models. From left to right: Jan Hendrych, Jaroslav Petr, Vladimír Kopřiva and Vladimír Kučera, who later became the senior of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren
