Jan Bureš

* 1943

  • "We got a hundred thousand each from President Benes, the president - he was a gentleman, so my brother and I got a hundred thousand each for our parents. And when the currency reform came, we got it [in the ratio of] one to fifty or even more, I don't know. [In short] we got about five thousand of it."

  • "At the time, my uncle bought a small bust of the composer Antonín Dvořák, whom he loved, for the piano. And everyone who came to visit us said, 'That's Lenin.' The sculptor somehow didn't get it right... It was a white bust. So my uncle took a pencil... It was engraved, but only in the white material. So my uncle wrote 'Antonín Dvořák' in pencil. I loved him too, and I have all his symphonies."

  • "The [Allied] air raids were terrible. When they were unreported, prisoners stayed in their cells. It was hell - 'Dante's Inferno' as they say. Then, when the Americans liberated them, they opened the ration depots. My uncle ate half a loaf of bread, one tin of pork and began to swell up. So my aunt got ready, went and got a bottle of alcohol and poured it into him. He vomited, and that's how she saved him. When he came home in June in his forty-fifth year, he weighed about sixty-two pounds, otherwise he weighed ninety. He was a tall and strong man, a gym teacher. My cousin could not recognize him at all..."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Plzeň, 17.08.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:53:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I‘ve been so serious since I was a kid.

Jan Bures as a little boy in 1947
Jan Bures as a little boy in 1947
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Jan Bureš was born on 18 March 1943 in Pilsen. His father Jan Bureš worked as a bookbinder. His mother Marie Burešová worked in the household and sewed women‘s clothes. His parents lived in Plzeň, Roudná, and together with other relatives they joined the resistance organisation, the Second Light Secret Division. They hid the commander of the group, Jindřich Krejčík. On 20 June 1944, the parents were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pankrác. Jan Bureš was executed on 20 October, Maria Bureš on 14 November 1944. Jan‘s uncle Karel Bureš and his wife Ludmila were also executed. Aunt and uncle Hrček were deported to the concentration camps in Dresden and Leipzig, but they luckily survived. Other relatives also suffered a difficult fate. Jan was separated from his older brother Vladimír and brought up by the Hrček family. After training as an electrician, he worked as an operating electrician in Škoda factories from 1960 to 1982, then was employed in Plastimat in Černice. In 1961 he started his basic military service in Liptovský Mikuláš. In July 1965, he married Jarmila Solilová and they raised two children together. He refused to join the Communist Party and in 1989 signed the petition Several Sentences. From 2001 he worked in the company Papírna Slovany, four years later he retired.