“I have just had my nineteenth birthday. We were sitting there in the morning and I suddenly spotted some movement at the junction where the road took turn from Slavíkov to Vestec. The Germans were setting up a heavy machine-gun targeting directly the door of the lodge. Short thereafter they burst inside and made a thorough search from the basement all the way to the chimney. Us, who were present there, were taken to Trhová Kamenice for interrogation. They put a potato bag over our heads so that we could not arrange anything among ourselves. The first interrogations took place, then they followed at the Gestapo in Pardubice. There we stayed until first of March when they put us on a transport to Terezín. This was not the Jewis ghetto from where they sent people to Auschwitz but the Small Fort of Terezín which at that time served as Gestapo’s prison for cases which had not been fully investigated or which they needed to save as backup for further interrogations. At this Small Fort of Terezín we would go to work to Litoměřice and the surrounding villages. They even dispatched a special prison train to Ústí nad Labem every morning, where we worked at digging a fire-reservoir.“
“I also remember that there was a shortage of toilet paper during the dysentery epidemic. Some elementary hygiene had to be respected. So they gave us German newspapers. For the first time we had learnt where was the war front which many of us had no clue of. There were people there who had already been locked up for years. Only when they got hold of these newspapers as toilet paper, the message would spread that Warsaw was long ago conquered and that the allied forces are going through Hungary. – Q: “How did the liberation turn out, did those Germans just suddenly disappear?” – “The Germans usually disappeared. A part got stuck within the walls of the Josephine fortress. When the gates closed, a group got stuck in with a lorry with hastily slaughtered pigs. So those did not leave. But even before that were some groups leaving and nobody really tried to stop them. It was about living or not living through the liberation.”
“Two groups were guarding the fort. One of them were the German SS, the other one were Croatians. At that time there was an independent Croatian state – or so-called independent – which had a unit stationed there in Terezín. They would normally combine it so that in each work group there would be someone problematic. For instance this scout leader used to be an officer in the Government Forces and served in North Italy. I never learned what got him captured or why he all of the sudden appeared in the Fort. We would tell each other that there would be time to share those stories after the war. Since any clumsy revelation within the walls belonging to the Geheime Staatspolizei – Gestapo – was very dangerous and could have led to execution. I saw an execution at the fourth courtyard once, when they caught a fugitive who attempted to climb over Terezín’s walls and was caught.”
Jiří Pradáč was born on 23 January 1926 in Prague and grew up in Střešovice district. In the 1930s he was active in the scout movement, organizing a big tent camp annually. The first years of war had not had a great impact on him or his family. However, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo used his school building to shell paratroopers hiding in the orthodox Cathedral of Saint Cyril and Methodius. In autumn of 1944, him and his family moved to Jiří‘s uncle at the Highlands where at the same time a Soviet airborne division was headed, named Mistr Jan Hus. Jiří made contact with the partisans and helped them acquire equipment and food. During Gestapo‘s raid at the beginning of 1945, the whole net of collaborators had been arrested. Jiří went through tough interrogations in Pardubice and later was imprisoned in the Small Fort of Terezín. The prisons would go to forced labour to Litoměřice and Ústí nad Labem, Jiří worked at the digging of a fire-reservoir. He recalls food shortage as well as an epidemy of dysentry which he had also fallen sick with. Fortunatelly, he was able to avoid typhus infenction. In Terezín, he got to know a scout leader who helped him live through the last weeks of war. Following the liberation of Terezín at the beginning of May 1945, Jiří returned to his family in Prague. After the war he graduated from high school, undertook compulsory military service and later worked in airplane engineering. He also took part in the scout movement again, before it was finally banned.
