Jiří Hýř

* 1948

  • "We had a meeting, we caught some game in the mesh." - "The Russians?" - "So we were dealing with it and he asks me, he was just a major, but he was from the political leadership here at the base and he says, 'Do you have a gun?' I say, 'Well, I do.' And he says, 'Well, shoot him! And let us know, we'll clean him up.' And I said, 'But I can't do that, I can't kill a man. That's impossible!'"

  • "I came to work in the morning and we were told by the supervisor, 'Take the tractors, the two-wheelers and dismantle all the road signs!' So we drove around all day, dismantling signs and putting them on the truck. I had a giant banner across the middle of the combine at that time. And when I think back, I had a deer permit back then, so I had a hunting rifle with me all the time. It didn't occur to me that anybody would mind, but they would drive maybe a hundred or two hundred yards down the road from us. So when you think of all the things that could have happened... They might have got it wrong. So the Poles were the best. They always stopped us and asked, 'Where is the Russian army?'And then they went the other way and said, 'We can't find them.'"

  • "Well, it's just, we had four guys staying in the room and we had one guy who thought it would be a good idea to go and convince them. It was not far from us, we were staying in a student hostel in Podolí and this was in Pankrác, on náměstií Hrdinů. They had a headquarters in a building there. They were guarding it. Four of us went there, two of them were talking to some Russian guy, and my friend and I had the stupid idea to take down the red flag over the entrance. We thought we had it well read, so we took it down. But they had a sentry on the roof of the building next door. He fired, and that's when the patrol came back. Basically, I can say it's my own fault, because it never occurred to me that someone might shoot at us with live ammo. So I wasn't running for my life. I ran, and I can tell you, I was only ten or fifteen yards short of a sharp turn that would have put me out of sight, and I got it. I had a gash in my left shin, and it shot the bone under my hip joint that far. The second shot grazed my pelvis on my right side. A lady who was walking on another sidewalk with me was injured, she was innocent. But the soldier with the machine gun was firing from the waist."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Valeč, 02.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 02:51:55
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

If I ran like I was running for my life, a Russian soldier wouldn‘t have shot me

In military forest uniform, 1970s
In military forest uniform, 1970s
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Jiří Hýř was born on 9 December 1948 in Habartov near Sokolov. As a child he lived with his parents in the old Most before its demolition, later they moved to Lubenec. He went to study at the University of Agriculture in Prague. After the first year, when he stayed with his parents in Lubenec during the summer, Czechoslovakia was occupied by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. In Lubenec he participated in hiding road signs to protest the occupation. After returning to school in Prague, he went with a group of students to discuss with Soviet soldiers who had their headquarters on náměstí Hrdinů. While two of the students were discussing with the soldier, Jiří Hýř and another student thought that they could take away the Soviet red flag that they had raised in front of their headquarters. The Soviet guard noticed this and started shooting at them with a machine gun. Jiří Hýř‘s leg was shot through as he fled, and he also wounded a random passer-by. Jiří Hýř almost lost his leg, but doctors saved it in the end. After this incident, he lost the desire to continue his studies in Prague and left the school. He went back to Lubenec and eventually moved to Valeč in 1971, where he started working at the local forestry administration and stayed until the revolution. He often dealt with the leadership of the local Soviet garrison about incidents caused by their soldiers. In 1990 he finally became the first post-revolutionary mayor of the village. Later he worked at the Valeč castle as a maintenance man. In 2024 he was still living in Valeč as a pensioner.