Jiřina Dupalová

* 1924

  • “In forty-three the selections started, there were less and less of us at school because we were being assigned to the Reich. So I didn’t wait for anything, I rode home, and the Germans had moved an aircraft engine factory to Semily, so I started work there. I was employed for about a month when my summons came. And the director wrote that I was already assigned to labour in Semily, so I worked in Semily.”

  • “I remember that I woke up at about five in the morning, and I wanted to go have a drink. We always had a glass of cold water on the window sill, and as I came to the window, across the street - I was walking with my eyes closed, so as not to rouse myself too much - a shot rang out. I looked, and there were German soldiers standing across the street. So I quickly pulled away. Well, and then they started throwing grenades, by the church there. Such a racket, we didn’t know what was going on. It looked like it was happening in the house next door. We had a wardrobe in the wall like this, so we climbed into it and peered out of a crack to see what was going on. Well, and we saw there were lots of dead people there. They hadn’t closed the street off, they let the people go on their way to work, and they shot them up.”

  • “When we went to school, we’d go past the church with one friend of mine, and she said: ‘Come on, let’s look inside the church, we’ve been walking by it for a year and we’ve never been inside.’ So we went there, and it was kind of gloomy there, but she was so curious that she went all the way behind the altar. I stayed by the entrance, so I could make a run for it. So I looked around, and there were these two little windows, like there used to be in cinemas, and I saw an eye of some kind, that someone was observing us, probably one of the paratroopers. And I said: ‘Jindra, let’s go, I don’t want to be here!’ Well, so we left, and a few days later all this took place.”

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    Mladá Boleslav - byt pamětnice, 16.11.2016

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I just wished they would shoot me straight away

Jiřina Dupalová
Jiřina Dupalová
zdroj: PNS

Jiřina Dupalová, née Jonášová, was born in 1924 in Kutná Hora. In 1928 her family moved to Košťálov, where her father owned a vinegar and mustard factory. During the war Jiřina went to study a language school in Prague. She lived in a girls‘ boarding house opposite the Church of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street. From the window of her room she saw the Gestapo operation against the paratroopers who had assassinated (Deputy) Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. As every young Czech born in 1924, she too was summoned to forced labour in the Reich. She dodged the assignment thanks to the director of the Semily aircraft engine factory, who confirmed that she was already assigned to work in his plant. After 1948 the Communists confiscated her father‘s factory, which was placed under the management of the local agricultural cooperative.