"And now we heard from the other side, as from Tumpach, how someone... the vigorous shoes... it was the escort that went, and between them, they led the convict. That was Parizek, if that tells you anything... he was an informer from Pisek, he joined the Germans. Of course, he wrote himself, Parizek, without the wedge on r. And he was walking among them, and he was handcuffed, and wearing pumps and knee socks, and he was wearing like the Germans wore that forestry coat with the stand-up collar. And now there were two of them walking, two in the back, and he was walking in the middle of them. And now they came up to us and now he passed us and the three of us as we stood there and he passed us he looked at us. It was such a beautiful evening, a beautiful, humid evening, a beautiful... well, May evening. Not like today. And it was warm and kind of like the faint blush of dawn... I'm a little bit in tune with that, or rather... well because you paint, you relate to it... and he looked at us and I still to this day when I go there. Especially when the weather is like this, and it doesn't even have to be, I always remember it in the middle of it and now I see those eyes. And to this day I remember what I was thinking at the time. 'What is that man probably thinking now...' When he goes there and he saw it from a distance, the gallows that was built and the crowds of people, black."
"And now I was walking up the stairs to the house, and now this Milda was flying down the stairs towards me. He was dressed up, he was wearing hiking boots, like he was going on a hike, and so on, and I said to him, 'Milda, hello, where are you going?’ He did not answer and he was gone. I just came upstairs and I heard some noise, next to them. And I came home and they told me to stay quiet as there were Gestapo men next door. So I listened to some shouting, screaming and what I remember at the time was Mrs. Perličková saying: 'Leave my children to me, leave my child to me! Why are you taking my child away from me?' And that was the only thing I remember from that, to this day. They're the kind of sensations or experiences that you remember all your life. Then I'll tell you one more, one more memory. Well, he flew up the stairs, he just ran away from them, and he must have had it figured out in time, because we had a corner house and one entrance was on one side and the other one was shared and you could run through it. So he ran through the yard and in the next house he hid in the woodshed, downstairs, in the cellar. Apparently he assumed, he thought, it was darkest under the candlestick. And it didn't work out. So they locked him up. They both came back, in that forty-fifth year. Milda came back, Mr. Petrlicka, I don't know when he came back. Milda suddenly appeared, he was all nicely dressed, nicely tanned, and he was wearing such parts of American equipment."
"March 15, 1939... well, I was six years old at the time... we didn't follow politics, as boys, we weren't that interested in it, well, not at our age either, of course. And our parents didn't talk about anything in front of us. Then it came to the point that the Germans came here, the German garrison, and that gave me such a strange impression. As boys, we liked those soldiers. It was driving, they had great music, fantastic music, and now they had these tanks and all this stuff, which we've never seen here in our lives, and they were quite decent. And I know that back then, in the Great Square, the Germans built field kitchens and they gave people there for free their national food, that eintopf. Which I tasted, and I absolutely hated it. That's desperate, that's terrible, there's everything from turnips to meat, in short, whatever you can find at home, you can get there. And so the people from Pisek came there with mess tins to get it, there was music playing and we quite liked that. It was a regular army and that was the young age. And I still remember one time I stopped in the arcade, there was a glass case and there were pictures from the movies in it. And I was staring at it, and it was up there, I couldn't see properly, and I was tiptoeing around looking at it like that, and all of a sudden I felt somebody grab me under the arm and pull me up like that. And he started mumbling something to me, I didn't understand, it was German, so I was looking at it and he put me on the ground and it was two guys in Wehrmacht uniforms and they were laughing terribly. And they asked me questions, but I looked stupid because I didn't know."
Jindřich Prach was born on October 7, 1933 in Písek and grew up as an only child in a family of small businessmen. He started going to school at the beginning of the Second World War, so most of his childhood memories are related to this period. He recalls his initial boyish enthusiasm at the arrival of the German army in Písek in March 1939 and his gradual awakening when he began to understand some of the consequences of the German occupation. He witnessed when the Gestapo arrested a neighbour‘s son, who was only a little older, and fully understood when arrests and executions began in his home town after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Many of his memories are connected with the end of the war, when first the American army troops and then the Red Army arrived in Písek. The curiosity of a teenage boy at the end of the war led him to rather dangerous games, when he collected discarded weapons and ammunition around the town, as well as to one of the last public executions on our territory. It was the execution of a collaborator from Písek, sentenced to death in the post-war retributive trials. After the war, he began to study at a real grammar school, but after a year he transferred to the Secondary Ceramic School in Bechyně, where he could fully develop his artistic talent. Under the influence of the ongoing intensive recruitment, after graduating from the art school he entered the Military Apprenticeship School (former Military Academy) in Hranice na Moravě. Shortly before graduation he was expelled from the school, the reason being his participation in anti-communist activities of a group of students. He was investigated by the military counter-intelligence and subsequently accused of „subversion of the republic“, but thanks to an amnesty after President Antonín Novotný took office, he was granted a pardon. After leaving school, he began working as a promotional artist in Svit Gottwaldov, the former Bata factory, and returned to Písek in 1967, when he won an audition to become head of promotion at the then-famous company store of the Písek textile factory Jitex. He stayed in this position until his retirement. Jindřich Prach passed away on Januoary, the 29th, 2023.
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!
