MUDr. Jaromír Klika

“How did it all begin? Was it fate, circumstance or predestination? It is hard to remember the details after sixty years but I can still recall the dark and gloomy atmosphere. It was a time when our state was in danger, a threat and insecurity for us all. We felt loyal to the state and answered some call of duty, something that is hardly understandable for today’s generation, and it lead us to the establishment of Zbojník. It was also due to the Boy Scout principles, the oath and the law to protect the weak against the strong and good against evil. All this provided a little spark that started a fire. Our first steps were quite informal and without any heroism – I thought to myself: ‘I have to call Ada. We’ll meet and figure out what to do.’ And Ada told me: ‘I was just going to call you, we’ll meet at our place, we can’t talk about it on the phone.’ And so we met at Ada’s in Smíchov – he lived next to the Smíchov theatre.” – “Ada was a Boy Scout nickname?” – “No, his real name was Adolf Karlovský, lately he became an army general. He was a soldier and they promoted him later. He was a soldier in his mind, after the war, he graduated at the military academy, then he served in Romania for a short period of time. In the fifties, he was imprisoned for a long time. He was first sentenced to death, then to life but he eventually managed to escape. He fled to Switzerland where he lived until the end of his days... So Ada was a member of our group. And when the Junák Organization was banned we were just about to swear the Boy Scout oath, so we decided to put together a few boys from our group and Ada’s task was to find someone to train and lead us. And when we met, Ada’s answer was pretty obvious. ‘That’s just what I wanted to suggest,´ he said. Maybe it happened differently, maybe Ada was the first one to say that. But it is a fact that the Zbojník was established. It was lead by Jan Lašťovka, a sergeant-major back then. It seemed to be simple but it wasn’t so easy. We sealed our conspiracy in Fall 1940 with a meeting at professor Klika’s cottage in Jevany. That was a real conspirative and subversive meeting. It was in a cottage with closed shutters and dimmed lights by the fireplace when the Zbojník was established and its basic principles were outlined. We swore a military oath over the flag. Until then we were all non-soldiers.”

“In the time of confusion just before the Prague Uprising, we got a message that they would drop rifles. It was planned for two or three spots near Černý Kostelec and somewhere behind Smíchov. So we organized the whole operation. My task was to gather all the weapons in a depot in Nusle. Anytime I pass by I remember that there was a large agricultural depot at the corner facing the junction of Nuselská and Na Jezerce.” – “There is a dairy there.” – “Yes something like that. We got an order to wait there that they would bring us the weapons. And as you probably know, the rifles weren’t dropped in the end and they came back empty-handed and we were all really annoyed.” – “So you didn’t set up the landing spots?” – “No, my task was to find a place in the depot so that we could have stored the weapons. I was there with other guys from the 4th company and I was the one in charge.”

“So you didn’t do any intelligence activities, but you rather trained your military skills?” – “First we trained our military skills, second, in the time of Steiner Veselý, we weren’t allowed to get involved into any destructive operations like shooting etc. We had to be cautious to be able to gather all the strategic information and hand them over to Veselý and transmit them abroad. Even this was complicated because we had problems with the transmitters and we had to cancel it several times. You might be interested in the fact that the London intelligence headquarters, the abbreviation was VRU, received approximately 75 thousand messages during the war. About seven or eight thousand out of those were from the Prague Intelligence Brigade. I learnt just recently that the news of the Brigade, for example those for air force (RAF), didn’t have to be verified and they were directly handed out to them and considered to be accurate. So we were the only ones whose messages were classified this way. In September 1941, when Heydrich became the protector, Eliáš was arrested. We were extremely cautious in those times. At a certain point we even stopped some of our activities until the situation got better again.”

“During the repression after Heydrich’s assassination, Karel Rohlíček from the Intelligence Brigade had a father who had printing works in Vysočany and Karel used to print flyers. They had printed schedules that informed about the times and frequencies of the London broadcast we would leave in phone booths. We had to do everything in gloves, so that they could not identify us and the flyers had to be pressed in the fourth print because then the copy became so bleached that they could not trace the machine it was printed with. So Rohlíček provided us with this. Or we printed warnings against collaborators which we placed on their doors. And old Rohlíček knew Gabčík and Kubiš (who later assassinated Heydrich). Karel used to ride a bike with them around Prague because they didn’t know the city. So he was teaching them what Prague looked like. Their parachutes were buried. Old Rohlíček knew a priest in Vysočany, so they staged a fake funeral and buried a coffin with the parachutes of the group. Karel Rohlíček carried the cross before the coffin. So the parachutes are buried somewhere there. This is a curiosity people may not even know.”