He was strolling with his mum. Then it exploded and they reached Heydrich in a minute
Jaroslav Pišoft was born on the 8th of May 1937 in Prague, his father Jaroslav worked in Transport Enterprise as an accountant, his mother Bohumila was a housewife. Jaroslav did not have any siblings. In May 1942 he and his mum were returning from shopping in Libeň when they heard a loud bang. They were approximately 200 metres from the place where the paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš successfully assassinated Reinhard Heydrich on the 27th of May 1942. They reached the car that was hit by a bomb approximately a minute after the attack. Jaroslav, who was five at that time, remembered some snatches of the events that were happening immediately after the attack of paratroopers on Heydrich. His mother took a bicycle to a nearby gas station and she later thought that one of the paratroopers used it to escape. His parents moved Jaroslav to his uncle in Zbečno immediately after the assassination so that he did not speak about it and did not endanger anyone. Police officers sent his mum to Gestapo for an interrogation, but the German secret police described her statement as unlikely and released her. The family lived to see the end of war without any problems. Witness´s father died in 1949. Jaroslav studied at secondary school and worked in Prague Transport Enterprise his whole life. He got married and had one daughter. He was living near Opletalova Street in Wenceslas Square in the time of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops (21 August 1968). He remembers Soviet tanks and an explosion of an artillery shell that made a hole in the roof of their building. He kept a piece of the shell at home as a souvenir. He could not progress in his career during normalization because he was not a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He welcomed the Velvet Revolution, he considered the life after November 1989 freer than before it. He was living in Prague in 2020.
