“I spent two years in school, until 1942. I passed my graduation exam during the period after Heydrich’s assassination. That was not pleasant. Inspections were coming to classes, and a German clerk was checking the clothes which were hanging from hooks along both sides of the classroom and checking if somebody had a weapon in the pocket. There was a case like this, and the boy then got involved in it and he was the first victim among our schoolmates.”
“Under Wahl’s leadership this group grew into a large resistance group of informers. Germans themselves contributed to it when they employed university students in industrial factories, and also when they sent (assigned, as it was called) secondary school students into all kinds of factories in various locations. None of them could be a super spy as they are shown in television, when they break into a vault and get to some secret materials. But there were several thousands of boys who were in different factories which were producing various parts, or they were in railway stations and they were observing the movements of trains.”
“At first I did not have much work. Some messengers were riding the trains, but I recommended to let them do it only for a short time and then send somebody else, because you never know when somebody notices that this person travels back and forth regularly. When the Germans issued a regulation that we were only allowed to ride trains within a 75 kilometre radius of our home, for me it meant that from Prague to Kolín, which was my place of residence and work, it was less than 75 kilometres, and further 75 kilometres in the opposite direction reached somewhere beyond Pardubice. In Pardubice I was handing over documents to another man. I only knew his cover name, nothing more (…). When I arrived to Pardubice, there would be just one returning train to Kolín within a few minutes, and then there were no other trains in the evening. I worked during the day and only after work I was able to travel somewhere.”
Zdeněk Reinhardt was born on June 2, 1921 in Kampa in Prague. He spent most of his childhood in the Bubeneč neighbourhood. Zdeněk graduated from grammar school in 1939 and he was admitted to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Czech Technical University. As soon as he enrolled in the first semester, the Nazis closed down the universities for Czech students. He thus began working in the Ringhoffer factory in Prague-Smíchov. Zdeněk passed a second graduation examination at the secondary technical school in Smíchov during the war. At that time he met people organized around Veleslav Wahl who was one of the founding members of the Intelligence Brigade. Zdeněk was employed in a train car factory in Kolín during the war, but he also served as a messenger for the Intelligence Brigade along the Prague - Kolín - Pardubice route. He completed his studies after the war and in the 1950s he began working again in the former Ringhoffer factory, now renamed Tatra Smíchov. For the rest of his professional life he focused on production and development of train cars. He was involved in the construction of the railway test track in Velim. He also worked in the Research Institute for Railway Rolling Stock, where he remained until his retirement. The well-known Czech photographer Dagmar Hochová was his life-long partner until 2012. Zdeněk survived her for only two more years and he died in August 2014.
