"We were looking out the window, it was just candles or flashlights. These were mostly flashlights, because Hanák, a businessman from Boskovice, arranged for them to leave for Skalica. And so it was like a light march around the city... We went nowhere, without seeing each other and saying goodbye.”
"Three Gestapo men came with Náhlík, the chief warden in Boskovice. The guard jumped there and watched, and I watched them look at it and they approached my mother hard. The mother defended him, of course, and said, 'You know, Mr. Náhlík, what it looks like...' During the First Republic, he had books on the occultism and had various instruments for measuring man. At that time, my grandmother came to us, the train passed her, and she returned from the station. And when she saw the driver there, he was the fourth, so she says: 'You have a car with a Brno sign here, I missed my train, couldn't I take you to Brno?' He says, 'Yes, but you wouldn't want to be with me.' And I was strolling there, wondering where to go, and I was grabbed by the Gestapo man by the collar and so deftly he pushed me between them and pushed me out into the street. They were looking for a way to slander their father, or they took with them, they had more people arrested here. In the end, it turned out that the mother said the father was crazy. When asked about his writings and coincidentally, some of the books fell down, because there was a lot of stuffing in there and the mother gestured, 'You know, Warden, how it seems to him that he wrote about some other things here than you want about the German issue.'"
"I have been recruited several times. During the rule of Bílek, the division commander. When one turned to the division, Coufal, the major, was given 15 years. His deputy, he got 10 years. I got into it so that that they said openly, 'If you don't come with us, then practically this means that we will literally destroy you.'"
"My superior, the platoon leader, was then in diplomatic circles in Switzerland. And I got to the point where he used me for all sorts of things. And this was one such matter, because Bílek returned from a concentration camp with poor health; he was the commander of our division. Čepička came in and did a purge with Novák, and Bílek was completely broken down and they took him as unwanted, although he was serving in Subcarpathian Russia from the beginning and gradually got to the position of general. And he handed over a personal pistol in front of me when Čepička summed up his fate on ninety pages."
Jaroslav Dvořáček was born on January 16, 1929 in Boskovice. Father Karel was a legionnaire from the First World War, a private farmer and an amateur healer. During World War II, the family hid a Polish refugee from a concentration camp. Jaroslav Dvořáček witnessed tours of the Gestapo in their house. He remembers the forced departure of the Jewish population from Boskovice, the end of the war and the arrival of the Red Army. In 1949 he graduated from the Peasant Higher School in Přerov. His parents never entered the collective farm, so he had a bad staff report and did not get to college. He started working as an agronomist. In 1951 he joined the military in Nitra, where he graduated from the officer‘s school. He then served on the General Staff in Prague and witnessed the degradation of uncomfortable generals. He was offered to stay, but refused. He worked in leading positions in various agricultural enterprises in South Moravia. He got married in 1953 and had three children with his wife Jana. He joined the Communist Party. In 1974, he succumbed to pressure from the StB and committed himself to the cooperation he admitted. He is registered in the Security Forces Archive as an Astra agent. He was pleased when the communist regime collapsed in 1989. He died on May 15, 2021 in Boskovice.
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!
