Vojtěch Šimek

* 1924

  • “I do not really know how long I was lying there with typhus. I remember waking up from the typhus fever one day, looking around, being deaf and being completely bald. I lost all my hair but it later grew up again. I was looking around and the other prisoners were saying something, waving their hands. I did not know what was going on. They were pointing outside so I crawled on all fours towards the exit. Instead of the Gestapo soldiers, there were Czech policemen guarding the posts of the Small Fort. I realized that the revolution had already begun.”

  • “Later we went to the woods to seek contact. In that forest we found another two men and one Russian. At that time, the Germans encircled the whole forest and sent the dogs in to find and catch someone because there had been many desertions to the partisans there. You cannot hide from a dog. We ran, climbed up a tree and the dogs barked below. This is how they caught us.”

  • “I do not know how long we had been in Krnov when it happened. Suddenly, an airplane dropped a bomb right into the prison premises. Allegedly, it was a Russian airplane which had to unload. But it fell on the other part – we had been in the left one and the other prisoners were on the other end of the building. We began to suffocate because as the bomb fell, there was dust around there and all. We were suffocating. We banged on the door for someone to come and let us out because we could not breathe. It took about an hour for the Germans to recuperate. They encircled the prison from the outside. Most of the dead were among the Poles, poor them. ‘Mamko moja!’, they would cry because some of them were seriously wounded. ‘All out!’, ordered the Germans. So we all had to get out, they encircled us and we had to clear away the wounded.”

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    Zlín, 08.04.2014

    (audio)
    délka: 54:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Jarda had told me not to go because the battle of Prague was still on. But he stayed and died of typhus.

 Šimek Vojtěch
Šimek Vojtěch
zdroj: Paměť národa

Vojtěch Šimek was born on 22 April 1924 in Bludov near Šumperk. He attended elementary and secondary school, and used to exercise in the Sokol movement. Right after finishing school he was forced to take up a job at a farm near the Bludov chateau, which was under German administration. In 1943 he and his friends Weiser, Jaroslav Špička and Jaroslav Plhák decided to leave for Slovakia and join the partisans. Initially, they planned to acquire weapons from the miller Hubert Habermann. Vojtěch broke into his house at night but failed to find the weapons. The second attempt was successful - Vojtěch stole a hunting rifle from Korkyša, the German manager of the farm. They exchanged the rifle for a revolver and set out in the autumn of 1943, successfully getting to Bílá. Their efforts to contact the partisans were terminated after some three weeks by German soldiers who encircled the forest and sent the dogs in. The boys were arrested and imprisoned in Krnov where Vojtěch witnessed the prison being hit by a bomb. He and his fellow prisoners had to clean up the impacts of the explosion. He went through prisons in Opava, Brno and through brutal interrogations at the Šumperk Gestapo. All four boys were convicted and taken to the Small Fortress of Terezín. Vojtěch was interned at the fourth yard. Every day he would go with the other prisoners to work in Litoměřice, building an underground factory. He was a typical Aryan and therefore always had a certain advantage. He did not have to work at the factory, merely bringing water to the others. By the end of the war, he fell ill with typhus. After the liberation, the Russian medics transferred hem to the former ghetto. He immediately signed up for a transport to Poděbrady from where he got to Zábřeh and eventually back home.