Dr. Jaroslav Podlipný

“From the last ones, I remember the roll-call on May 1st. All prisoners assembled, thirty of them were selected and these people were to be executed, or so we thought. But instead they were released. The day after, on May 2nd, the roll-call was held again, and everybody now thought that if their names were called, they would be released. People were therefore literally pushing forward. I remember one person, Dvořák, my former commander from the underground. When the names were being read, he heard ´…slav Dvořák,´ and he immediately began making his way forward. But the man standing next to him, a secondary school teacher of drawing, who knew Dvořák, stopped him. Dvořák heard the words ´…slav Dvořák,´ and he thought it was him. But the teacher stopped him, and so he did not report. Instead of him they were looking for Jaroslav Dvořák, and not Miroslav. He was in the sick-bay and they could not find him, and then they brought him from the sick-bay. He was ten years younger, my age, and he was from the Předvoj group. The people who were selected were then really executed. So this friend of mine Dvořák was lucky that he had not pushed forward and that this secondary school teacher held him back.”

“And first we were on our own and then I asked our former scout leader, sergeant Kovařík, for help. I confided in him. I still did not know whom to turn to, and eventually Kašík and I decided to ask Kovařík for advice. You could say, in 1940 or 1941 he was not prepared at all, and he advised us to practice fencing, and so on. He did not take it seriously. But we did not want to do it in this way. After some time he thus contacted his friend Franc, who was working in the municipal office; soldiers were usually positioned in these offices at the time. That was how it started. At the beginning, Franc himself was involved in the Obrana národa movement, but then things became more complicated and the organization later changed into an organization called North Bohemian movement. At first the movement did not have any name. Thus we established contacts and following the model from WWI, Franc wanted us to serve as messengers after a revolution. We told him this was not for us, that we had weapons and that we were capable of doing intelligence operations. He eventually adopted us and we became the real core of the organization, because the other resistance fighters of Franc´s were individuals.”

“My name is Jaroslav Podlipný. I was born in Mladá Boleslav on June 15th 1922. My parents had inherited a butcher’s shop, they were working in the shop themselves, they did not have any employees. Of course I don’t remember my earliest years, but it was a good time. In 1927 the situation started getting worse, the crisis was becoming apparent in Boleslav. At that time, we were still living in the centre of the town, on Riegrova Street. The first glass building of the Škoda company was later built in this place. And on the corner there was a house, and in there we had our butcher’s shop next to a pub. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but you cannot imagine what it was like. We shared a lavatory with the pub. And if you needed water, you had to go with a pail to the pub and bring it from there. The toilet was shared, and you couldn’t even go there, there was vomit all over from the pub’s regulars. I really hate to think of it, it was desperate then. When we wanted to take a bath, we would put a tin tub in the kitchen and we would be bringing water there from the pub hall, and then dumping the water out again. This personal experience of mine later made me tend towards the left. These contrasts... we had our bedroom next to the kitchen, and you could hear how the people from the pub went on making noise even after the closing hours. I have these bad memories of that time, and this experience had an influence on me from the beginning. After 1927, around 1930, we had to close down the shop, because another butcher’s shop was set up nearby, and they had their own house and thus their business was doing much better…”

“Like all the other actresses during the war, Nataša Gollová had also compromised herself with a German. She felt guilt, and therefore she applied as a nurse after the war (to care for former Terezín prisoners – ed.´s note). She was not helping with the beds, but she was bringing us tea. One young writer wrote a very nice short book about her, he wrote it very well, but he did not mention her helping in Terezín in any way. I wrote a letter to him, asking whether he would include this fact, asking him not to forget that she took part in this kind of aid. But I got no reply and nothing happened. At that time, for us, when she was giving us tea through the window of the train car, it was our first meeting with somebody whom we regarded a representative of the liberated homeland. We felt greatly touched by it.”