"There was an infirmary in the monastery that was connected to the hospital at Karlovo náměstí and there was a dormitory for German nurses. And it got it. There were a lot of dead nurses there. I still have that one nurse in my head, stuffed under the sink, dead. (...) It just won't go away from my mind."
"I was given a military rifle, which I had never seen in my life, and I didn't know how to shoot from it at all. And they made us into guard troops so that when the Russians came to Prague they could rest and not have to guard their quarters around the barracks at night. So I (...) served several times in the barracks in Kbely. (...) I was very scared, I'll tell you that, because I didn't know how to shoot, and it was said that there were German SS men scattered around the Čimický háj. I was there for two nights. After every two hours we walked - everyone had 50 meters of fence to guard."
"Because I was already an engineer and there was no PTP yet (...), so they put me in Košice, so that I could be very close from Prague to the horse artillerymen. I, a native of Prague, who had never seen one in my life, and I was there for two months. That was the worst two months of my life. I felt so humiliated there, it was such an ordeal, it was terrible. You can't imagine what the horse duty was like at night. There must have been this wooden shuffleboard, and there were two of them for twenty horses, and they had to watch all the time to see if any of the horses were wetting themselves. And if he urinated, they had to catch the urine immediately with the dipper so that he wouldn't get wet underneath. (...) Terrible."
"They got to our house at four in the morning, which was the end of May, so it was already dawn. Four of them came to the house. Two went up from the basement and two went down from the fourth floor. They searched every apartment, felt in every drawer, every bookcase, everywhere. There were three of us - me, my mother, my father, and we had to be in pyjamas with them in the same room, right where they were (...). They were there for at least half to three quarters of an hour before they searched those three rooms. (...) But they didn't throw anything away. They just looked at it and discussed it."
Miloš Panýr was born on 30 March 1926 in Prague. His father was a builder and founded his own company, his mother worked as an accountant and the family lived in Kandrtova Street in Prague Libeň. After the assassination of Heydrich, the Panýrs‘ apartment was searched by Nazi security forces. After completing his seventh grade education, Miloš was totally deployed in the Luftschutz paramilitary organization and during the air raids he was tasked with searching for victims and helping to rescue them. At the end of the war, he was transferred to a guard unit and had to guard the Kbely barracks with a gun in his hand. After the end of the war, he graduated in an accelerated octave and on 1 October he started studying architecture and civil engineering at the Czech Technical University. After February 1948, his father‘s construction company was nationalized. In 1950, Miloš Panýr was called up for military service with the horse artillerymen in Košice, where he lived one of the worst periods of his life. A year later he was conscripted to the Technical auxiliary battalion (PTP) in Most and then to Žatec. He spent his professional life as a designer at Chemoprojekt, where he designed, for example, the Nuclear Research Institute in Řež near Prague. In 1957 his team was awarded the Order of Labour. He joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia under pressure from his colleagues, left the party during the normalisation purges after 1968, and since then he has not been able to hold any leading positions, but has remained in the field.
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!
