"I really don't have good memories of it. It was a time of great fear, because my father's colleague, his name was Janáček and he was a teacher, lived in our house and he was involved in the anti-Nazi movement and was allegedly hiding a paratrooper called Valčík there. As far as I remember, I was visiting them, and shortly after I left, the Gestapo arrived, and they took Mr. Janáček and his wife, also a very beautiful woman, a ballerina at the city theater, so they took them away and executed them."
"One night there was an air raid, the bombs fell on the houses in Neruda Street. The houses on both the left and the right side of the street are rebuilt now. A bomb fell about 100 meters from our house into the garage, there was a crater about three meters deep. The pressure was so high that we had to hold onto the banisters to get down from the fourth floor to the basement. Even the locked balcony door was broken down. We had two cabinets at home, they were in the kitchen facing each other. But the pressure knocked them down, so they made a kind of tent in the middle of the kitchen."
"We were surprised that they didn’t execute everyone in the building, when they were able to massacre entire villages. We lived on the fourth floor, and when someone rang the bell, my mother would take me in her arms and we would go to the balcony, ready to finish it. So we wouldn’t have to end up with Germans."
Jaroslav Plíšek was born on May 27, 1937 in Josefov, his mother’s native village. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a mathematics and art teacher. His only sibling died as an infant of pneumonia. He spent his childhood in Pardubice. He still has memories of the war, especially of the Heydrich Terror. After finishing grammar school he studied at the University of Chemistry and Technology for two years and then transferred to the Faculty of Education in Pilsen, where he received the title of graduated educator. He spent two years of mandatory military service in Mikulov. In 1961 he got married and together with his wife raised two daughters. During his teaching career he changed schools in the Pardubice Region several times. In November 1989, he worked as the deputy headmaster and later the headmaster at a school in Pardubice, Spořilov. He retired at the age of 60. In 2022 he lived in Heřmanův Městec.
