Jaromír Šída

“After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich it was rumored that every tenth Czech would be executed and that they would pick the people by random based on their ID numbers. In the end it turned out that this wasn’t true – it was just a word of mouth. But still, only how terrible were those times when every day the papers would publish a column containing the names of the executed people. Well, it was terrible.”

“Our illegal movement was exposed in 1944 and several of my classmates and students from other classes were imprisoned. The Gestapo came to get them. First, they jailed them in Pankrác and later they got as far as to Dresden. Jaroslav Sládek from my class was also sentenced and he practically saved my life. Only much later I learned that when Gestapo interrogated him they asked him if he knew a certain Šída and he said that he didn’t know anyone of that name. This basically saved my life because otherwise Gestapo would have came to get me.”

“As the prisoners passed over we found out that several partisans were dragging along some alleged SS-man from the Palmovka direction. He hadn’t had his hat on, was all bloody and held his hands up. They hurried him in front of them as the people from the sidewalks asked them: ‘Where are you taking him?’ – ‘We are taking him somewhere where we can shoot him dead.’ So we followed them and in the end they found a spot behind the Libeň church. Later, we learned that he was one of those Germans who had committed a massacre on Czech inhabitants in the Žižkov district. So they brought him behind that church where they told him to take off his shoes. He did and they then gave him a pickax. He had to dig his own grave and when he was done they shot him from several assault rifles and he fell. They threw him to the ditch and unless someone had dug him out in the meanwhile he is there to this day.”