“The situation in the ‘Little Fortress’ was different from the liberation in the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was taken over on May 4 by the International Red Cross. It was people from Switzerland, Sweden and the like. It was doctors inspecting the inmates for typhus or spotted fever.
Since the New Year, the Germans were releasing people who committed some minor offence and were not really important. They released about twenty of them a month. These people were usually sick and they were treated by the International Red Cross that knew the situation and that came there on that 4 May.
It happened on a Friday afternoon. They were giving us shots against typhus. On Saturday at 11 o’ clock, they opened the doors to our cells and we were free. The SS-men started to leave the prison at two o’ clock in the afternoon. We could move around the prison freely. In the forth prison yard, there lay five thousand typhus-infected inmates. They used to carry potatoes from the prison vaults to the kitchen. Since they shut down the fourth yard, we were bringing the potatoes to the kitchen.”
“My dad was in the Pankrác prison. He got sick and had to be treated at the prison hospital. On the day of his release, my mom went to Prague to meet him in front of the prison. She waited in front of the prison and after he was set free, they walked together through Prague to Dejvice where the Canadian embassy is located today. A crowd of armed people was erecting barricades there in order to hinder the Germans from entering the city. My parents couldn’t get farther so they stayed there. They helped the fighters with preparing the food. They only got home on 9 May. They came on foot from Prague. When they came to Brandýsek, Soviet soldiers stopped them. My dad explained to one of the soldiers that he had been imprisoned by the Germans in Prague and that he’s now on his way home. The Soviet soldier clapped him on the back and said that everything’s going to be alright now. He also gave him a meat can that was a German production. They walked through Brandýsek and at the other end of Brandýsek stood another Soviet patrol. They asked them who they are and where they are going. They then checked their bags and found the German meat can in it. The Soviet soldier said: ‘it’s in German - you are a German!’ and he wanted to shoot my dad. It took my dad a while before he was able to explain to the soldier that he wasn’t German and that he got the meat can from his comrade-in-arms down the road. My dad could have died there. So that’s how they got home.”
“They summoned me to the Gestapo headquarters on 2 January. At that time, I worked for the ‘Technische Nothilfe’ (technical emergency help – it was work at military construction sites, airports, etc.) and lived in Německý Brod, today’s Havlíčkův Brod. We worked in construction – they were building an underground factory at the place. At the Gestapo, they wanted to know who had made that coil for our radio. I denied knowing anything about it – I told them that I had been away from home for half a year and didn’t know where my dad got it from. Then they asked me about the whereabouts of my brother. I told them he was in Berlin and that when I was home for Christmas, my mom showed me a two-week old postcard from him in Berlin. But my brother did it in a smart way. He wrote a number of postcards in advance, put future dates on them and had his friends who stayed in Berlin send them for him every month. So when the police officer came to our home my mom just showed him the recent postcard from Berlin and he wouldn’t even bother to go and check the attic. It was a decent police officer. He just put it down and that was it.
When I kept lying they told me: ‘alright, we will interrogate your mother’. But my mom had a sick heart and I knew that she wouldn’t survive the interrogation. Moreover, my brother needed her at home to do some cooking and laundry for him. That’s why I confessed that I made our coil. That’s how it ended – they stopped asking about my brother and didn’t talk about my mom anymore. But when I came to the Gestapo detention center, I learned that they gave the death sentence for three or more coils. I made a total of eight coils for different relatives and friends. So I was very lucky that it ended in this way. It could have been much worse.”
Jiří Schmied was born on June 30, 1926, in Vinařice. The family soon moved to Knovíz. His father worked in the ČKD works in Slaný. During the war, he had to commute to work to Prague. This became fatal for the family. Once, he and a friend chatted in the train about the latest reports coming in from abroad via the London broadcast. Their conversation was intercepted by an informant who found out the identity of his dead and denounced him to the Gestapo. His dad was arrested in October 1944. Father and son were sentenced to four and a half years in prison for the installation of a short-wave receiver into their radio and for listening to the prohibited London broadcast. They were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt prison and held there till the end of the war. Mr. Schmied lived in Knovíz, where he became the mayor a few years after the Velvet revolution. He held this post for several years. Died in 2017.
