Josef Bílek

* 1939

  • “As a six-year-old boy when I still did not attend school, I used to run away along the shed, there was a stream and there were meadows and woods. It was more than a kilometre away. And it was after the armies had already gone through the area, there was a lot of material left there after the Germans; broken-down machines, guns and ammunition, and many other things, and I was amazed by them. I saw many cartridges and I stuffed cartridges into my pockets. I saw a grenade over there so I put it behind my shirt. And I saw there a belt with cartridges so I put it over my shoulder and guns, I also saw there guns. The guns were damaged, they either did not have a breech or they had a broken rifle butt... I took those guns and I was covered with them and before I got home, I had to throw away half of them because I was not able to carry all of them. And I had to secretly hide the things that I had brought in a henhouse. I also had to hide the grenades in the henhouse, they were round as eggs, so I put them into the henhouse behind the hens. And my mum went to get some eggs, reached for them, and pulled out a grenade and it did not explode... And she run to see grandma and said: ‘Grandma, look what the boy had brought there, the things that are there!‘ And grandma said: ‘Girl, these are grenades...‘ And so she threw them out, but nothing exploded.”

  • “Members of many different units of the army were walking there and I remember the way the captured Germans were walking, they had to keep hands over their heads, they were frowning... And they were barefoot - the Russians had taken their shoes and they had to be barefoot. And it was just a gravel road back then, there were stones and they were walking on those stones. And there was a little Russian girl with a machine gun, the machine gun was bigger than she was and when a German did not hold his hand up in the right position, she poked him like this [with the barrel of the machine gun to the ribs] and he jumped up and put his hands up. And she kept running around them like a satellite. And there were several hundred of them... It was so quiet, at first it was such a roar, and then everything got quiet, and I looked at what was going on, and the Germans... And they were such burly guys, and they were walking - without belts and shoes off, barefoot, and they had to have hands like this [above their heads] ... Oh, the way they were treating them, the Russians... They must have sent them to Russia afterwards to work somewhere in a gulag. “

  • “The Germans lost their way and got there... A German platoon lost their way there and they wanted to go to the barracks in Vlašim and stopped at the mayor´s (house). The mayor took them somewhere, they accommodated them somewhere, and gave them something to eat. And it had rained so they helped them get dry. And it was not a good thing what he did because one of them managed to run away from the barn and he reported at the headquarters in Vlašim that partisans were there and that they had been captured and so they (German soldiers – trans.) set out there on 7 May. It might have been on 8 May in the morning, it was four o´clock. They went there with a Hanomag, and they had a heavy machine gun mounted onto a platform. And so they set off there and had the order to arrest forty men from the village and shoot them (facing the wall). There was a road near the mayor´s. There is a memorial... They established it there, it is still there. And they made them face the wall and they wanted to shoot them, I mean those forty men. And they also wanted to burn the place down, just like Lidice. And fortunately, teacher Hauser who could speak German was there and he spoke to the officer. That there were no partisans. They thought that... there were partisans there. - ‘After all, we gave your soldiers food and we helped them get dry. There are no partisans here.‘ He was persuaded and they [the men from the village] had to go to Vlašim in front of the machine gun, hands behind their heads...”

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    Sedlčany, 07.12.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:28:16
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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My mum was crying and I understood that my dad was among the men who were made to face the wall

Josef Bílek in 2021
Josef Bílek in 2021
zdroj: Memory of Nations recording

Josef Bílek was born on 5 February 1939 in Vlkonice, a settlement in the Benešov Region, where his parents owned a farm. The family had to move out at the end of 1943 due to the foundation of a military training area for the SS. They did not lose just their house but also their main livelihood. They got an alternative accommodation in a nearby village of Veliš where they lived in extremely poor conditions until the end of the war. Josef has childhood memories of May 1945 when the Red Army was approaching the area of Benešov and German soldiers, mainly members of the SS units were quickly and chaotically escaping from it. Only partly armed Czech rebels were getting in their way and many conflicts which often had a tragic end took place. Such an event took place on 7 May 1945 in Veliš. SS soldiers captured and wanted to kill forty men there, Josef´s father was among the hostages. The execution did not take place thanks to a negotiation of the local teacher with the commander of the German unit. Josef also remembers the arrival of soldiers of the Red Army, the departure of captured Germans, and also the condition in which the area of Benešov was after the war. The Bílek family returned home in May 1945, but the house was largely destroyed and the fields littered with unexploded ammunition. That is why Josef´s father signed a contract to rent a farm in Milonice, another nearby village, for six years. The farm became part of a united agricultural cooperative during collectivization; however, Josef´s father refused to join it and the family returned home to Vlkonice in 1952. Josef graduated from a grammar school and then from a water management extension course. He worked at the Hydrometeorological Institute in Prague for almost his entire working career. He returned to his native place for retirement and he tried to reconstruct the house in Vlkonice. However, he did not finish the reconstruction due to health issues and he sold the house. He lived in a retirement house in Sedlčany at the time of recording in 2021.