Jiří Jurka

* 1931

  • "On the twenty-first of August, of course, we all got dressed and went straight to the town. There I bumped into Vašek Postránecký at the theatre and Vašek said, 'Let's go tear down the signs and the notices.' So I was running around Brno with Vašek Postránecký, tearing down signs and notices and stuff. But unfortunately the sadness had already started settling and it was awful. Even on that twenty-first of August and during the whole year, it still went on, we really protested, we didn't come to terms with it and we didn't accept it."

  • "I remember one more thing, the air raids. Brno was hit by a big air raid on 20 November, it was a really big and terrible air raid. I was in Borotín at that auntie's place then, and I remember the the bomber planes flying over. That was such a sound: vzzzzzzz and that was every other day, those planes flew over us there. The Americans were already doing whatever they wanted in our airspace at that time. The Germans, the Luftwaffe too. When the Battle of London was fought, where they really had the upper hand, it was horrible. And then the Americans retaliated against them so much that I think that Dresden, for example, needn´t have been destroyed so much. Although on the other hand I think that morally it was necessary to break their pseudo-moral, it wasn't moral, it was perverted enthusiasm."

  • "On the morning of the fifteenth of March we got up. Dad was waking us up and said, 'The Germans are here.' We lived at 55 Střední Street, I have to get back to that. We moved there from that Kuldová, as I said I was born on Kuldová Street, when I was six months old. There was a new house built there, a big block of flats, built by Mr. Hanák, the architect. Mr. Hanák, the architect, was either really playful or he made a bet with somebody. He built a house that had three entrances, stretching then from Dlouhá Street, now Staňkova Street, to Střední Street. It had three entrances and mind you, it had a hundred exactly the same flats, it had no extension anywhere, it had no attic anywhere, no. That house had a flat roof, that house was a flat cube and there were a hundred identical flats in that house. It must have been something terrible for the architect. Mostly Czechs lived in our house. We knew that there were some Chládeks living on the ground floor, who we knew were from Vienna. But our neighbours in the corridor, the Hauri family, we hadn´t known they were Germans all the time. The fifteenth of March came, there was a dusting of snow outside, and we looked out of the window on Střední Street, and we could see Větřní Street and Dlouhá Street. And we were absolutely amazed at how many windows had swastika flags in them."

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    Brno, 13.02.2023

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Jiří Jurka in his youth
Jiří Jurka in his youth
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jiří Jurka was born on 22 May 1931 in Tovačov, but lived his entire life in Brno. On 15 March 1939, he witnessed the German occupation of Brno, with many residents hanging out swastikas. On 17 March 1939, when Hitler visited Brno, he stayed at home with his parents in protest. During the period following the assassination of Heydrich, he heard shooting in Kounic‘s Halls of Residence. He spent the liberation days at his aunt‘s house in Borotín, where he had experienced air raids before. He remembers the violence committed by some Soviet soldiers. He witnessed the expulsion of the German inhabitants of Brno at the end of May 1945. In 1946, during the parliamentary elections, he tore down posters of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). He graduated from the Brno grammar school in Antonínská Street. In 1951 he started studying the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno (JAMU). From 1 January 1961 he was engaged in the Satirical Theatre Evening Brno (Večerní Brno). In the 1960s he was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for five years. From 1967 he acted at the Reduta Theatre. He experienced the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Brno. He protested against the occupation, tearing down direction signs and notices to confuse the soldiers. In 2023 he was living in Brno.