Lucie Janotová

* 1932

  • "He was there, as I said, in Leopoldov. And that's where we [his mother and I] got [permission for] our second visit. The first visit, it turned out the way it did. Not pleasant in mind or body. I was alone on the first visit, and his mother and I were on the second visit. When I got there, there was a wall, small windows. Then they brought me in and then Radďka [was] on the other side, with guards on both sides. I don't know what they were holding, but it wasn't rifles, it was something bigger. And they said: 'Now, no intimate touches, or the visit is over!' So we didn't even shake hands, we weren't allowed to. So you just made eye contact. I don't even know what we talked about. We couldn't even talk. It didn't come out of my head or my mouth. You were like speechless that this could happen. You were wondering, my God, how could this be, a boy like that, what he must be suffering here, when I saw what the prison looked like. Even when we came into the gatehouse, it was full of scruffy communist guys."

  • "He was a Czech, but he was such a... I would say so, and I wouldn't be ashamed to say so, even though I'm not a foul-mouthed person, but he was a bugger. He probably got something for it, for revealing it. And he easily knew all the names, so he gave them up, and then they just picked them up. It was a big raid. It's interesting, I remember the Gestapo being there, many cars around the factory, and one by one these resistence members, there were about thirty of them, they were arrested and taken away. We were such a close-knit village there, little house next to little house, everybody knew that these arrests had happened there."

  • "He suffered because of that too, I may have said that last time, that the governor was someone whose name was Šípek or Čípek. And this Alvín used to get phone calls. They had a telephone, in the Gerls´ villa, an aunt. And so they even threatened him that he was no German if he could allow a traitor's family to be under his own roof. I remember that, something of it literally. And that's what Alvin said. And he always said: it is my house and I have the children there, and they have nowhere to go. .'No one pushed me, and I gave them housing of my own free will because I could.'"

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    Jindřichův Hradec, 12.12.2021

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    Jindřichův Hradec, 05.03.2022

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The Nazis took away my father, the Communists took my husband‘s freedom

Lucie Janotová, 1964
Lucie Janotová, 1964
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Lucie Janotová, née Čurdová, was born on 16 May 1932 in Háje nad Jizerou in the Podkrkonoší region in the family of Jaroslav Čurda, a teacher. The family lived in the village of Dolní Sytová. Right after the beginning of the World War II and the declaration of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, her father joined the resistance organization Obrana národa (Defence of the Nation). Soon he became a commander of the resistance in Dolní Sytová, where they were engaged in activities against the enemy regime. However, after being denounced by a neighbour to the Gestapo in 1941, her father and then the whole group were arrested. Jaroslav Čurda was subsequently interned in Germany and executed in 1942. After the war and after studying in Mladá Boleslav, Lucie met her future husband Radislav Janota. However, even here the beginnings of the relationship were not easy. Radislav Janota, one of the first post-war Czechoslovak pilots and flying instructors, who had been taught the profession by Western pilots from the Royal Air Force (RAF), was charged with treason and sentenced to thirteen years in prison in 1950. In 1956 his sentence was revised and he was released. Immediately after his return home, he and Lucie were joined in marriage and later had two daughters together. In the following years, as the daughters of a political prisoner, i.e. an unreliable person, they faced difficulties to be admitted to university. In 2022, Lucie Janotová was living in a retirement home in Otín near Jindřichův Hradec.