Jaroslav Pišoft

* 1937

  • “I think that when we reached the car, Heydrich was getting up, got off the car towards the track on the left side of the car, the door on the right side was damaged. He got off, he was standing and a car came there at that moment, it was a removal company Holan. When my mum saw that a policeman put a bicycle there, she took the bicycle and took it to a petrol station. She told to the petrol station attendant that someone had forgotten it there and that he should give it to the person. The petrol station attendant answered her: ‘We know everything.‘ That was the end, my mother left. She did not realize what the statement - ‘we know everything‘ - meant. She only realized it during the following days. She did not put on the dress she was wearing that day till the end of the war.”

  • “We had already reached the car with my mum. I remember that Heydrich´s driver rushed out of the car and crossed the railway line. It happened in V Holešovičkách Street where there was a tram line, and it was on the line itself. So, he crossed the tram line and he stopped a lorry that was coming from Holešovice in the direction of Kobylisy. The driver stopped, he showed him to ride around him and the driver reached the car. He took down the side wall from the body, Heydrich walked towards the body and because he was tall, he sat precisely on the body. He lifted himself a little bit using the lorry body and he sat down. The driver caught his legs and lifted them to the lorry body. He closed the side wall, he [Heydrich] turned towards us because there were more of us. The wife of doctor Knot was there with us and when she saw it, she said: ‘God help us, he is imperial protector!‘”

  • “And a stream was flowing between the gardeners. And so that the rubbish did not flow into the drain, there was a sedimentation tank. It was always burbling in the tank. Water was flowing into the tank and it was burbling there. I had to go to see it as a five-year-old. I was looking down and suddenly a loud bang was heard, when the bomb exploded under Heydrich´s car. We ran towards the car with mum. The police arrived after a while.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 26.05.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:42:20
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He was strolling with his mum. Then it exploded and they reached Heydrich in a minute

Jaroslav Pišoft was born on the 8th of May 1937 in Prague, his father Jaroslav worked in Transport Enterprise as an accountant, his mother Bohumila was a housewife. Jaroslav did not have any siblings. In May 1942 he and his mum were returning from shopping in Libeň when they heard a loud bang. They were approximately 200 metres from the place where the paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš successfully assassinated Reinhard Heydrich on the 27th of May 1942. They reached the car that was hit by a bomb approximately a minute after the attack. Jaroslav, who was five at that time, remembered some snatches of the events that were happening immediately after the attack of paratroopers on Heydrich. His mother took a bicycle to a nearby gas station and she later thought that one of the paratroopers used it to escape. His parents moved Jaroslav to his uncle in Zbečno immediately after the assassination so that he did not speak about it and did not endanger anyone. Police officers sent his mum to Gestapo for an interrogation, but the German secret police described her statement as unlikely and released her. The family lived to see the end of war without any problems. Witness´s father died in 1949. Jaroslav studied at secondary school and worked in Prague Transport Enterprise his whole life. He got married and had one daughter. He was living near Opletalova Street in Wenceslas Square in the time of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops (21 August 1968). He remembers Soviet tanks and an explosion of an artillery shell that made a hole in the roof of their building. He kept a piece of the shell at home as a souvenir. He could not progress in his career during normalization because he was not a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He welcomed the Velvet Revolution, he considered the life after November 1989 freer than before it. He was living in Prague in 2020.