Jaroslav Jochec

* 1946

  • “I applied for an exit clause to Belgium every year until 1968, because I had two uncles and an aunt there. And I always received a paper, they sent me a letter that my trip abroad was undesirable. And in 1968 the Russians came and stayed here; in 1969 I did the same and they let me go in 1969, but they let me go without my wife and two children. I had to leave them here so they had a guarantee that I would return. Of course, when I arrived there, my uncle offered me a job, they had a job for me, I could join the docks in Antwerp as a locksmith. But then we had two children here, Jára and Vladika were already born.”

  • "And my brother basically emigrated, he worked in certain wine cellars in London. And then Husák, he was in the office only for a few months, and he announced an amnesty. So, he came back and that he can come back, that they won't punish him, that they will keep his passport, everything. And the brother arrived, they didn't lock him up, but they took away his passport, so he couldn't even go to the GDR to buy sardines, as it was customary to go there to buy them from the Germans."

  • "Because the war lasted six years and dad didn't see his parents and siblings for six years. The war ended here in 1945, so he took my mother and my brother, who was three years old, and they went to Belgium. However, when they came to Belgium, in the meantime his parents went back to the Czech Republic, because my grandfather was a communist and he knew that Czechoslovakia was a democracy before the war, under the rule of Masaryk, so he came back here because there was nothing too broken unlike in other countries. Well, my grandfather worked here as a glassblower in Inwaldka in Dubí. It's just that they didn't blow glass anymore, they made pressed glass in a normal fashion there."

  • “Dad was 23 when World War II started. He was single. And when the Germans invaded Belgium and went to France, my father escaped from Belgium to France and enlisted in France in Agde to the 42nd Infantry Regiment. It was a Czechoslovak infantry regiment he joined as a regular soldier, as an infantryman. It's just that the Germans pushed them from above, from the north, down to the Mediterranean Sea, so that army actually disintegrated, the French one di as it was defeated. And they didn't know what to do with the soldiers, so they turned them into legionnaires. Well, they put them on a ship and took them via Gibraltar to Algiers and then to Morocco. My dad got as far as Tobruk and El Alamein, but he didn't fight there, they just passed through the columns and came back. They then put them on a ship again in Gibraltar and took them up to Scotland, where they landed in Scotland and there they were distributed to the centers. They were looking for pilots, rear gunners, deck gunners for the planes. And dad got in because he had a small figure, so he was the rear gunner in the bomber.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Novosedlice, 14.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 53:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Occupation troops for a birthday present

Jaroslav Jochec in 2022
Jaroslav Jochec in 2022
zdroj: Paměť národa

Jaroslav Jochec was born on August 21, 1946. His father, Josef, enlisted in the 42nd Infantry Regiment in Agda during the Second World War, then served as a pilot in Great Britain, in the position of rear bomber gunner. Due to an injury, Josef had to leave the air force and worked in the militia in London. Here he met his future wife Aneta Irena Apicelová, Jaroslav‘s mother. In 1943, their son André was born in Britain, Jaroslav was born three years later in Czechoslovakia. After returning home and after 1948, Jaroslav‘s father was imprisoned and sent to work in the Jáchymov mines. He was later forced to join the Communist Party due to his family situation. In 1952, Jaroslav entered a municipal school, then graduated from a vocational school, followed by two years of compulsory military service. At that time, in 1966, brother André went with his mother to visit relatives in England, but the brother refused to return. He did so a little later and the regime subsequently confiscated his passport for one year. In 1969, Jaroslav received permission to visit relatives in Belgium. In 1989, for example, he participated in a demonstration on the Letenská plain. After the Velvet Revolution, he worked for seven years in Germany near Dresden. In 2022, he lived in Novosedlice in Ústeck.