Jana Chalupová

“Grandpa then said that Mr. Salač could no longer be in the attic upstairs. When there were no people in the backyard, he and Salač dug a hole with a little window behind the cellar. It was so small that you could squeeze in only if you were lying down. It was a tiny room where Mr. Salač spent two years.”

“Written in Jiřice during the German occupation. In these years there was great shortage of flour, bread, meat and meat products. Josef Salač, a butcher from Kostelec nad Labem, and others, like Bohuslav Kaper, a miller from Lobkovice, and butcher Čejka from Kostelec, were selling, and above all, delivering, foodstuffs to the families of people who had been arrested. They were arrested because they were good Czechs and patriots and because they hated Germans. Most of them were arrested when somebody informed upon them, and especially the butchers were imprisoned in the Petschek Palace. What they were doing to them there was enough. It is still not known who had turned them in. When they caught all of them, the court trial began. Čejka was a coward and the Germans who interrogated him noticed this, and he thus sided with them during the interrogations. They were giving him cigarettes and he was telling them what he knew. But he didn’t know everything. Above all, he didn’t know where the cattle was being slaughtered, and to whom the meat was being sent. Salač was a brave man. He had friends and sometimes he was even slaughtering cattle outside, somewhere on a out-of-the-way meadow. He was thus causing damage to Germans and helping our people wherever he could.”