Ing. Jiří Janský

* 1935

  • “People from the company management came to see me in December 1966 and asked me to join the Party. And I joined it because I had some friends there, they called themselves young communists. I went there thinking that it had to change, that it was not possible it would go on like this. And that the only way to understand those twenty years of my life was to join the Party. So, I join the Party with my friends. But I rather followed them because my personal stuff worried me at that time, but I was in the group. However, when they came (the Warsaw Pact troops), we all handed in our membership cards and said we were resigning our memberships.”

  • “I witnessed when the Germans surrendered in Prague. The capitulation of the Germans units was signed. It was in the middle of the city and Kutlvašr was there on our side – the surrender of German troops to the Prague Uprising was signed with him. All the German troops that were guarded, marched down Plzeňská Street away from Prague. They had personal weapons and they had to hand in all their weapons at the crossroad near U bílého beránka restaurant and they had to march towards Pilsen only in their uniforms. The Red Army, I know that from Kobylisy where I lived for some time, came to Prague from Kobylisy and liberated Prague when there were already no German units.”

  • “I experienced something which has shaken me. I saw the Revolutionary Guards members taking away some German captives… we called them (the Revolutionary Guards) ‘the plundering guards‘. They were escorting some Germans on foot. They might have been German civilians. They were taking them along Plzeňská Street towards Motol. Those escorting them were some armed Revolutionary Guards members. The Revolutionary Guards were not soldiers, those people were savages. Because I witnessed a situation when three or four Germans were falling behind. One of the Revolutionary Guards members ran towards them and started to rush them. Three of them managed to reach the group, however, the fourth one could not do it. And the man took a machine gun and shot him. He fell on Plzeňská Street and the rest kept walking. I witnessed it with my own eyes, and it shook me like a child."

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The 1950s? The caretaker forced mom to do the laundry for her

Jiří Janský as a senior student
Jiří Janský as a senior student
zdroj: the witness

Ing. Jiří Jánský was born on 20 August 1935 in Prague. His father Václav Janský was a financial clerk, and his mother Jarmila, née Josívková was a stay-at-home spouse. Jiří spent his childhood in Košíře, Prague in a place called “Na Cibulce.” He describes his experiences from the war in detail, mainly with the Prague Uprising when his father fought at the Main Post meanwhile he and other boys were running around the streets. He remembers the arrival of the Vlasov army, the departure of Germans and also the way the so-called Revolutionary Guards treated Germans. He had a tough upbringing of his father who fought at the front during WWI, spent four years of his military service during the First Republic and he adopted a military style of upbringing despite his dislike for the army. His father hid weapons in the kitchen during the war and then used them when fighting the German occupants. Jiří Jánský graduated from French grammar school, and he graduated from the Czech Technical University in 1958. He was an air conditioning specialist in the National Project Office, and he worked there for thirty-four years. He was on a business stay in Egypt from 1962 to 1963. He joined the Party in 1966, he let himself be convinced that it would be possible to change the political regime only via the party. In August 1968, when the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, he was on a month-long sightseeing tour of France. He resigned his membership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was removed from his leadership position. He became a widower at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s and he raised his nine-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son on his own. He got married for the third time in the 1990s and he changed jobs. He worked as a clerk at the revenue service, he got retired in 2000.