Jaromír Šída

“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.”

“The alerts usually took place before or around noon. Sometimes, my father wasn’t at home at that time. It would have been just me, my mother and my sister. As the air raid sirens went on we had a suitcase ready in the hallway, containing spare clothes. And that was my responsibility. I got the suitcase and grabbed my little sister’s hand. We went to a shelter where I left her on a bench to look after the suitcase. Then I ran back up to the apartment to help my mother with the rest. Often as it happened at around noon my mother was just about preparing lunch. So she would for instance just grab the soup pot and with it we would go down to the shelter where we then ate our lunch.”

“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.”