Jiří Chlumský

* 1932

  • "When the war ended, I asked where Frau Decker was. I wanted to see her again. She probably didn't have a clear conscience either, but it was wartime. They said that Frau Decker and other Germans jumped into a ladder truck full of hay, hid there and rode off. People discovered them halfway and beat them to death with sticks. They were German civilians. I remember Frau Decker always telling me that the Czechs were worse than the Germans. That we'd be surprised how many denunciations came from the Czechs. The Germans weren't so much looking for Czechs, much more Czechs denouncing each other. We always watched like mice being plucked out of the ground to see what was going on. We were slowly getting acquainted with the Czech nature of all kinds of people. It was terrible."

  • "Suddenly Frau Decker came to us and said she knew what we had done here, that she had taken care of us and that we would not go to any concentration camp on the condition that I had to leave Prague by the evening. So my mother packed me up and drove me to Chyšek near Milevsko, where I subsequently started school, and so the family was able to remain free despite this trouble."

  • "I organized a resistance with a bunch of boys. We were sabotaging the Germans. We did everything we could. We were such patriots. We were ten or eleven years old. One day we were walking from school down Šárecka street and I said that a Gestapo man lived there and that we would break his windows. So we smashed the windows of the Germans' flat with stones. The next day we came to the school and the Germans were already there, there was an investigation. Because I was in charge of everything, I got a C in morals, the whole gang got Bs in morals. They added to my punishment that the whole family would go to a concentration camp."

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    Praha, 13.04.2023

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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You wouldn‘t make a good socialist engineer

Jiří Chlumský in 1943
Jiří Chlumský in 1943
zdroj: pamětník

Jiří Chlumský was born on 21 September 1932 in Prague into the family of Jan Chlumský, a room painter. His mother Marie, née Dudařová, came from Chyška near Milevsko and was the daughter of a former legionary who was given a small farm after the First World War. Jiří Chlumský grew up in Prague 6 near Vítězné náměstí, which was a bastion of the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the age of ten, he played resistance fighter with boys and broke the windows of a Gestapo officer‘s apartment with stones. The family was to be sent to a concentration camp because of this. They were saved by a neighbour, a young German woman who worked for the Gestapo. However, Jiří Chlumský had to leave Prague, so his mother took him to his grandmother in Chyšek near Milevsko, where he went to school for about two years. In 1951, he graduated from grammar school, but he was not accepted to the engineering college because he was the son of a tradesman. He worked for fifteen years in the Projekta company as a draughtsman and graduated from a secondary industrial school (distance education). He then worked at the State Institute for the Reconstruction of Historical Buildings, eventually completing his education and becoming a fire protection specialist. In August 1968, he witnessed the shooting of a young woman by the Soviet occupiers in Prague‘s Klárov district. He never joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 2023 he was living in Prague.