Jaroslav Jágr

* 1932

  • "The Gestapo from Kolin, near Cesky Brod, came for my father. They dragged him away and I still have the memory of how they searched the apartment, threw everything out, the bookcases. There were things piled up to their knees in the small two-room apartment. They dragged my father to Kolin and interrogated him there. He was locked up for about four months. Then they let him go because it turned out that he hadn't visited his friends at that time. From Kolin he telephoned home to us that he would come by such and such a train. So we went to meet him at the station and I still have a memory of my father, who was a very good man, not yet fifty, and he had all his teeth knocked out after the interrogations. And during those few months he lost a lot of weight, about ten or fifteen pounds. He looked terrible. Bruised and all."

  • "There were all kinds of printed forms handed out at school. And there was character breaking going on. 'What did you think about the troops coming in, what did you do, and so on.' So I wrote down what I did and didn't do. I didn't write anything I was ashamed of, but I filled it out. I must say my wife was more forceful. She crossed it out and wrote, 'I didn't do anything anti-state, and what I think is nobody's business.' And she handed it to them, they jumped two feet in the air that she refused to talk to them. That's what offended them the most. So they were far more intense against my wife than they were against me. But we both failed the background checks. My wife got fired right away and I got fired later."

  • I have mainly the memory of Hitler's arrival in Liberec. From the window of our house you could see the station, not the building directly, but you could see today's Skloexport building. And the onslaught of Germans, the desire to see the Führer, was so great that the day before thousands and thousands of Germans had already streamed from the surrounding area to the station. The road between the station and the town towards the town hall was busy, people were sleeping there beside the road to see Hitler. Hitler came by train from Zittau to the station. Then he drove - I heard this from the participants, I didn't see it - by car towards the town hall. There he gave a speech, then he went to lunch at the Golden Lion Hotel. After a few hours, he returned to the station and drove on."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 14.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:32:41
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Communist took the father‘s bakery and prevented the son from working at the university

Jaroslav Jagr in the Memory of the Nation studio, November 2022
Jaroslav Jagr in the Memory of the Nation studio, November 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Jaroslav Jágr was born on 24 July 1932 in Liberec. Both his parents came from Kněžnice near Město Králové. Jaroslav‘s father Jaroslav trained as a baker in Chrastava. In 1915 he enlisted in the Austrian army and took part in the fighting on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Due to typhus he later served as a guard in Terezín prison. His brother, on the other hand, fought in the Czechoslovak legions. After the war, Jaroslav Jágr Sr. set up a business in Horní Růžodol and he and his wife ran it until 1938. After the occupation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany, the family moved to Český Brod, where they spent the entire Second World War. In 1941, his father was arrested and imprisoned for four months by the Gestapo because he was visiting friends in Liberec who were engaged in resistance activities. However, the memoirist‘s father was not involved in it, and so he was released shortly before the Heydrichiad. After the war, the Jágrs returned to Liberec and ran the bakery again. They were deprived of it by the communists in 1949 during the nationalization of their property. Jaroslav Jágr Jr. studied statistics at the University of Economics. In 1956 he married Milena Lacinová. Both of them worked as researchers and teachers at the University of Textile and Mechanical Engineering (VŠST) in Liberec during the 1960s. My wife had problems finding a job for several years. Jaroslav Jágr joined the LIAZ car factory, where he worked until the Velvet Revolution. In 1985, his wife succumbed to cancer. Later he married for the second time. When the communist regime fell in 1989, Jaroslav Jágr returned to the former VŠST, newly renamed the Technical University of Liberec, where he founded and headed the Faculty of Economics for four years as dean. In 2022, the memorialist lived in Liberec.