"The fact that ten people were never identified is proof of the torture and all the atrocities they committed there. There were twenty-one in total and ten could not ever be identified, but my grandfather was. He was only found after the war, right after the uprising ended on 8 May, by his family that week. My father found him; as I told you, he had fought in the Klementinum. He came back and the family actually had no clue as to where [my grandfather] was. There was confusion in Prague, Russian soldiers everywhere and a lot of excitement, and they were looking for my grandfather amidst all of this atmosphere."
"He told him, 'Well, you just cross here and you're in Germany,' because he had introduced himself to him as an English agent. And dad... Now, the guy left and basically nothing happened. After that, I don't know how long, suddenly the StB officers turned up and the agent was a fake and it was a set-up against dad. That's when the next stage of his life began, that is persecution by the State Security. The first thiing was that he had to leave that national committee to go work in the uranium mines. He was given a choice - to stay free and go to work in the uranium mines - so he went to Jáchymov."
"The Germans had no idea that they had weapons from the Todt organization, and so they basically stopped in front of the Clementinum and were going to do something like they did to the town hall. Well, the rebels had anti-tank guns. They only had three and fired one poorly; I know this from my dad's account. Then they only had two left, but they managed to destroy one HKL armoured vehicle and one German light tank afterwards. The Germans withdrew from the Klementinum and never really came back."
Jaromír Charvát was born in Příbram on 12 December 1953. His grandfather Rudolf Dvořák was born in 1888 and in May 1945 he went to fight on the barricades during the Prague Uprising. Together with 20 other people, he was arrested and taken to the Prague Castle‘s Deer Ditch where they were all tortured and then shot. Jaromír‘s father Bohumil Charvát began working for the Prague fire brigade during the war and he joined the resistance. In May 1945, he led a crew of firefighters who disarmed the Todt organization, seized the Klementinum and successfully defended it from the Germans. After the war, Bohumil Charvát went on disciplinary trial on charges of collaboration that eventually proved false. In the autumn of 1948, the State Security (StB) set up a trap for him to charge him. In the end, he was not sentenced to imprisonment but spent 20 years working in the uranium mines in Jáchymov and then in Příbram.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
