“Well, it was sort of wild. I learned about his execution from the newspaper. I was thirteen years old. We were living in Hulín and I had to commute to Kroměříž by train. I always bought a newspaper for the train ride because I was interested in the sport section where I could learn about the results of various matches. So I bought that newspaper and in every newspaper in these days, you had that black-framed announcement, who had been sentenced by the court martial. It was a commonplace in those days, these announcements in the newspapers. So I open the newspaper and on the first page there was a picture of the dead body of Kubiš and Gabčík. It was just after they had killed them in that crypt in the church in Prague. The shooting was on June 18, the court martial was on June 20 and the execution was on June 21. In that same newspaper, I noticed another black-framed announcement. In that announcement, I learned that my father had been executed. You can imagine what an impact this had on me. I was just on my way to school. I totally ignored what we did in the classes on that day. It took three days before I got a letter from my mom in which she explained it to me and asked me to be brave, that my father would wish so. Three days later! My mother learned about it from someone from the neighborhood who came to tell her that it had been in the papers. So me and my mom found out about his death in this way.”
“I remember that as boys, we would run to the hills behind Zlín and we watched the artillery fire turning the night sky red. It looked like there’s a storm in the distance. One evening, we were pretty far away, my mom didn’t know that because she would be scared to death. We went to the place where the film studios are located and we noticed that the battle lines are coming closer from the south. We came back home late at night. The next day, they sounded the sirens. We were supposed to take shelter in the bunkers that were near the small houses. I came home at noon and my mom was still at work. She worked some three kilometers away from the city center – quite a long walk. I met her on the way and when we were walking back, the bullets started whizzing in the air. By the time we had almost reached our house, a grenade exploded nearby so we jumped into that shelter and the shelling began. The machine gunners started to fight their way through the colonies and as there weren’t that many Germans left anymore, they proceeded quite swiftly. When the gunfire stopped, I crawled out of the shelter into the garden – I was a very curious young lad. Suddenly, a Soviet man is coming my direction. He was dirty, he had a machine gun in his hands and he’s coming right at me. I had no idea about these things but I was happy that he was my Slavic brother. So I walked up to him and as it was obvious that I didn’t want to harm him, we started to talk. I was having Russian lessons at that time so I spoke a little bit Russian. We talked for a while and I told him that I’m glad they came here. Suddenly, he spotted my wristwatch and said: ‘Časy! Davaj časy!‘ But I explained to him that I can’t give him the watch since it’s a remembrance. He accepted it. Otherwise, he’d have robbed me.”
“I was present at one of those illegal meetings that my father was having. We had a house close to Kroměříž and my dad got a visit from Brno. The visitor was Major Pergler. This man was executed along with my father on the very same day and that’s why I see a connection there. They were talking in our garden pavilion. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to be there but I was in the garden, hidden behind a fruit bush quite close to them. I heard that they were talking about some conditions in Brno and that my dad was very upset and said that the situation was unbearable. He said: ‘this is coming to an end’. That was in July 1941.”
“When I served in Brno, I worked in two different offices that were located in different parts of the city. One office that I used during the class hours was in the former law faculty building where the command of the third air-force faculty was located. That’s where the class rooms were located. That was the office where I spent the time till noon. I then spent the afternoons in the second office which was located in the Kounic College, where the dorms of the air force faculty were located. My office was on the ground floor with a view on the yard. For two years I was looking from my desk at the very place where my dad had been executed. I think that’s some sort of fate. I had to look at that place for two years from my office desk.”
“My grandma was very tolerant. When I was a child, I remember from school that the circumstances were very controversial. It was unthinkable for a Catholic to enter a temple of the Czechoslovak church. That was like treason and you’d get persecuted for that. We had a history professor at school who was Catholic and he thought that Jan Hus was a heretic. When he was teaching us about the Hussite movement, he was describing the Hussites as thugs and thieves. Can you imagine that? In fact, he was teaching quite the opposite from what the state wanted him to teach. And he wasn’t put into jail for this. So the relationships between the two churches were rather strained, they were like cat and dog.”
Jaromír Zahálka was born in July 1928. His father, Otakar Zahálka, was a distinguished soldier. Before the First World War, Otakar Zahálka planned to establish his own academy of music. However, his plans were thwarted by the outbreak of the war. He was conscripted to the army and in 1915 he was captured at the eastern front. In the internment camp, he got to know his first wife but he had to leave her soon, as the Czechoslovak legions in Russia were heading eastwards to Vladivostok. After his return to Czechoslovakia, he remained in the army. He got married for a second time in the 1920s and his second child - Jaromír - was born in 1928 (his first child was a girl named Jindřiška). In 1935 - 1939, he was running the Military Academy in Hranice. During WWII, he was a high leader of the resistance organization „Defense of the Nation“ (Obrana národa) in Moravia. He was executed on June 21, 1942, for his resistance activities. By the time his father was arrested, Jaromír was studying at the grammar school in Kroměříž. After the death of the head of the family, the family struggled to survive. Jaromír decided to honor the memory of his father by becoming a soldier as well. After his school-leaving exam, he began to study at the military academy in Hranice. In 1949, he became a member of the airborne army corps, but because of a negative review of his personal file in the era of the minister of national defense Alexej Čepička, he was transferred to the military technical academy in Brno. Working in an army that was dominated by Communist ideology, however, didn‘t bring him any satisfaction, and therefore he left it in 1954. Another reason that accelerated his retirement from the army were the insults against his father. General Otakar Zahálka was denounced as an „ardent henchman of capitalism“. This also served as the basis for the abridgement (it was reduced to half) of the pension paid to his wife. After Jaromír left the army, he worked in various positions wherever he could find a job. He worked in the coal industry, as an ambulance driver, in the bakery and in similar positions. In 1956, when conditions relaxed a little bit, he did distance learning at the Pedagogical Faculty and the school of engineering and afterwards, he became a teacher at the apprentice training center in Česká Lípa, where he stayed till his retirement. He died on May 8, 2012.
