“Every night I would sleep somewhere else at the house of some acquaintance. Orasice nearby Louny was one of the places I stayed over. A friend there knew somebody from a resistance group. He told me that he would get me in touch with them, that I had to get out of the country. The group was named MAPAŽ (Masaryk, Palacký, Žižka). It was led by a butcher, Kamil Novotný from Černčice nearby Louny. He accommodated me in his house. He was very kind to me; there was plenty of food there. Then they found a way how I could get across the border. They took me in a car and charged their guns. We met police officer on the way. The driver of the car told him: ‘Sir, I will give you a ride’. He took him to the police station and I sat next to him. On April 10, 1949, on Palm Sunday, I crossed the border nearby south-Bohemian Želnava. I had instructions – they told me exactly the way I should take. There was a marked way because they used it for gathering logs. It was snowing. I had a hard time to make it to the border. I was going down in the snow; the march took me a long time. I went from about nine to five or six o’clock before I got there. The members of the MAPAŽ group told me to go to the pub and give the innkeeper cigarettes. He let me sleep over at the place and he gave me a meal. It was not until the next day that he called the police because I was a refugee. The members of the MAPAŽ group were arrested about two or three months after I had left.”
“Between the years 1940-1945 I was employed at the Zeman Company working in the general store. I was in the position of an accountant but I basically ran the store. In 1943, the company owner was arrested for economic offenses. I was arrested too and I spent a few months behind the bars of the city court at Charles Square in Prague.”
“Throughout the war we would hide our uniforms. However, once the war was over, I put my uniform on – right on May 5, 1945 – and I decided to come to the help of the Czechoslovak Broadcast. The broadcast calls for help were present everywhere. On my way I ran into a German soldier and I ordered him to give me his weapon. He didn’t resist. I stopped the first car I met and it took me to the radio. I wasn’t guarding the barricade but I fought directly in the broadcast building. After the battle for the building was over, I was sitting right next to the news presenter in the studio and made sure nothing happened. Then they shelled the building and one of the bombs exploded right in the studio, not far away from me. Everybody else around me had been killed by the explosion and all of them lay dead in the dust, but luckily nothing happened to me. I ran to the other side of the Vinohradská Street. The street could be passed through the cellars of the houses that were connected. I went through them and when it was safe I emerged on the surface and went home. As a former soldier I was put in charge of protecting Vinohrady. Once I got back home, on May 6, I was appointed commander of the National Revolutionary Guards in charge of the Vinohrady district. For example, we would check the German refugees in Belgická Street. At the very end of the war, the Germans concentrated old men, children and women there and we just took it over. Those crazy national guards wanted to murder them all. I told them that they were stupid, that they will come for them. So I negotiated their departure and they really came to pick them up. It was logical. It didn’t make sense to murder them.”
“Through my stepfather and the Party of National Socialists I learned about the rent of a hotel in Horšovský Tyn. At the time they started the tendering procedure and issued a call for candidates. I and my parents got the hotel rented. We moved in there in 1945. I, along with my stepfather, ran the hotel. I also became politically active in Hošovský Týn. I ran for the National Socialists in the 1946 elections. The elections were won – just like everywhere else in the border regions – by the communists. The other three parties united against the communists, we had two members. Then we were preparing for the elections in 1948. I was on the ballot for the National Socialists for the Karlovy Vary region but I didn’t make it till the nomination because the action committee arrested me on February 25, 1948. Two local SNB officers came to me and dragged me out of bed. In retrospect, I can say that I was lucky. By arresting me so soon and before the communists really took over power, their apparatus didn’t work so well, yet. They weren’t fully in control yet. I spent the night in jail and the next day they brought me to Horšovský Tyn to the county courthouse. The judge acquitted me and so they put me in a black car that had been waiting in front of the building and they took me to Plzeň. There again the judge acquitted me. So we drove to Prague. The Prague 4 court finally found me guilty and so they could put me in jail. Compared to others, I was treated very decently in jail. With me, they would still have political debates. In September 1948, I was sentenced to three years and they sent me to the Kladno ironworks. They regarded me as a hero there because I was a political prisoner. When they released a friend of mine, we agreed that he’d come for me. He was waiting for me at the cemetery under a heap. The shifts were changing. I made arrangements and thus on the day we planned my escape, I was pushing a wheelbarrow out on the heap. There was just one guard supervising us and he had no chance to monitor all of us. It took him a long time before he was able to count all of us. I was wearing civilian clothes bellow my prison uniform which I left there as a souvenir. I escaped. By then escaping was still possible. After all, so many people could have given us away, even the taxi driver, but nobody ever did.”
Jan Sklenář was born in Prague on October 14, 1915. Together with his mother and stepfather they at first lived in Bohumín and later moved to Prague. In Prague, Jan Sklenář graduated from the highly regarded grammar school in Prague 19 in 1935 and soon thereafter started to study law at university. In 1937, he passed his compulsory military service and during the mobilization in the Munich crisis, he was assigned to the 125th artillery regiment in Bzenec. The closure of Czech universities by the Nazis in November 1939 caught Jan Sklenář in the fourth year of his studies. He found a job as an accountant in the general store of the Zeman Company. In 1943, the company owner was arrested for economic offenses and along with him Jan Sklenář. He was for several months imprisoned at the city court at the Charles Square in Prague. On the day of the outbreak of the Prague uprising on May 5, 1945, he participated in the fighting for the broadcast and he eye witnessed the impact of a bomb in the studio. As a former soldier, he was put in charge of protecting the Vinohrady quarter on May 6. After the liberation, he moved with his parents and brother to Horšovský Tyn. Here, Jan Sklenář became politically engaged in the ranks of the National Socialists and he was put up as a candidate in the 1946 elections. He ran again for election in the Karlovy Vary region in 1948, however, during the February Communist coup, Mr. Sklenář was arrested on February 25, 1948. He spent the night in jail and on the next day he was taken to the county courthouse in Horšovský Tyn. However, the judge acquitted him. There followed a transfer to Plzeň and from there to Prague 4. In September 1948, the court finally sentenced him to three years in prison and forced labor in the Kladno steelworks.
On March 17, 1949, Jan Sklenář managed to escape from the Kladno mines. With the help of the resistance group MAPAŽ (Masaryk, Palacký, Žižka), he was able to flee across the border via the south-Bohemian village of Želnava. At first, he found refuge in a refugee camp, then at the Masaryk University College for students in exile in Ludwigsburg. He later became the chairman of the Central Union of Czechoslovak Students in Germany. In January 1952, he traveled to the USA. He joined the Czech community in New Jersey, then in Little Ferry and in 1953 in Detroit. In 1954, he applied for the admission to the university. In May 1955, he graduated and received a Master of Arts. After teaching in Detroit he would later teach at the university in Ann Arbor. In the 1980s, he became a member of the board of advisors of President Ronald Reagan for the State of Michigan. After the Velvet Revolution, he returned to his homeland and settled in Prague. In 1990, he graduated from the Charles University and earned a doctoral degree in law (JUDr). Mr. Sklenář died on August 12, 2013, at the age of nearly 98 years.
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!
