Josef Koudela

* 1922  †︎ 2019

  • “He opened the drawer and there was a hand grenade in it. He also kept his pistol and ammunition for it in the drawer. Then he showed me such a tiny red star. He said that he would show it to the guerillas to prove his identity. I was amazed and didn’t believe him at first. I told him: ‘Mirek, you must be kidding me!’ But he really acted as the liaison of the partisans and was charged with safeguarding certain people and with supplying them with certain things.”

  • “How was life in Theresienstadt, in the Little Fortress?” “Look, as long as you stayed on your cell, you lived. But every time you walked out of it, you risked your life. If you only knew how many death people I saw? They got killed or they died. Some even died afterwards of the typhoid fever. It was piles of corpses that I've witnessed. Nobody can imagine what I’ve seen.”

  • “They would always take 15 Jews with us to the ditch. Two of them had to pull a cart with sacks. They killed all of them in one day. They did a swoop in the ghetto and afterwards brought an awful lot of Jews to the Little Fortress. They eliminated all of them within a few days. They eradicated those 15 Jews who went with our commando to that ditch in the course of a single day. They had to fight each other to the death in the ditch, standing with their feet in the water in the cold. When one of them was finished, they finished off the one left standing.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Třemošnice, 26.10.2012

    (audio)
    délka: 02:39:11
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Don’t regard me as a hero

Josef  Koudela
Josef Koudela
zdroj: Martin Reichl

Josef Koudela was born on 22 August, 1922, in Třemošnice. He grew up with his brother and his loving parents. After having completed primary school, he attended secondary school in nearby Ronov and later began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker in the Bartoš and Associates factory. Shortly after the beginning of the war, the Nazis arrested Josef‘s father who had served as a member of the illegal Communist Party in Licoměřice and also presided over the trade unions in the factory. For his communist convictions, he was put into jail for four years. He returned from prison in 1942 in a poor state of health. In 1944, Josef had the opportunity to help the partisans who at that time operated in the Železné Hory Mountains. He agreed to cooperate with them and was tasked with supplying them with food. He was also charged with the task to determine the weak spots of the factory where he worked. The production in the factory had been refocused on the war industry after the breakout of the war. Unfortunately, the activities of the group were disclosed in the winter of 1944 and Josef Koudela was arrested along with others. They were first detained in Čáslav for a week and thereafter they were sent to Theresienstadt, where they were placed in the so-called small fortress - the dreaded Gestapo prison. There, they experienced a number of harsh interrogations. Josef Koudela remembers the grueling work, lack of food and the all-pervasive cruelty of the Gestapo officers. Shortly before the liberation in May 1945, he caught typhoid fever and only received treatment after the arrival of the International Red Cross. When he finally recovered from the illness, he returned to Třemošnice to see again his parents and fiancée. After the war, Josef Koudela completed his secondary education and got a job in Česká Lípa, where he then spent a substantial part of his life, together with his wife and two sons. After he retired, he returned to his native Třemošnice. Josef Koudela died in 2019.