Miloš Nevoral

* 1929

  • "At that moment, I had just run into the boss in Pražská Street and we went to the square. [The invaders] were coming down Sokolská Street from Hrádek, and there was shooting already. He said to me: 'Stay right here at the plant and keep an eye on what's going on. I have to go.' I don't know where he went. He left me there, and I stayed there for thirty-six hours, watching the phones. See, we were concerned about supplies and so on. Our shop was managed from Ústí nad Labem. They would instruct him on what to do and how to get supplies. For example, the director of the waterworks said, not a single litre of water [for the invaders] at the time. For our part, we wouldn't give them any food. People were just riled up. But then, unfortunately, it all turned around and they stayed here forever."

  • "Lojzík (Alois) who had been with a government military unit was sentenced for life. I remember it clearly because I was there as a spectator when they hanged Herta after conviction. She was then put in a coffin, loaded onto a truck, and Lojzík sat on the coffin and they took them to Jihlava."

  • "The Jihlava Gestapo suppressed it, so people scattered about but unfortunately forty people who were there, including my four older classmates, were killed. They all came from the same family and their name was Bílek, I knew all the brothers. Josef, the oldest, was a trained salesman. The second, Bedřich, was a trained blacksmith and the youngest was a trained tailor. On the sixth of May, the Gestapo drove a tank to their family home. The father saw it, jumped over the fence, hid there and said: 'It's too bad'. They picked up all four boys, took them to the town hall and shot them in front of the town hall."

  • "When they came to Třešť, of course they took over the business and so on. And there was currency, one crown, one mark. And then it was one to ten, which means that the mark was worth ten crowns. And they came to the butcher Šmíd and wanted a piece of salami. They took out a mark and he gave them a whole round of salami for it; otherwise the salami cost around six crowns. Why? Because he made the rolls with goat's milk. And that was a specialty. And he had rolls - he gave six rolls for a crown. Otherwise the rolls of twenty pennies each."

  • "Of course, I still remember how the military transport arrived, because all the partisans already blew up the bridges around Jihlava. So you could get to the western front, or rather arrive only from Kostelec to Třešť, Telč, Slavonice. A heavily armed train went to Třešť and stayed there as it didn't have enough steam, so it just kept stayed standing there. And it was already in 1945 and suddenly the dredgers came in. Do you know what the dredgers were? "Mostly black pilots flew in it and they flew behind the woods, using the waves and shooting the locomotives, destroying the transports that were already riding the armored vehicles. And once in Hodice they attacked the train and shot the locomotive into pieces."

  • "For example, my brother escaped abroad from the communists. Several friends agreed to go to the Bata factory to Canada, to America. So they went and were finally betrayed and caught at the border and imprisoned in Pilsen on Bory. From there they got to the camp here to Mimoň, and from there they were sent to the mine in Ostrava to Karviná, which was an army mine. And it was also said for those, who were there, that their return was undesirable. "

  • "And at that one of the stationers upstairs lived the pastor who taught us, and his name was Chalupa. But he was so strict that he wore a cane in his briefcase. It was a curly type, which was rather painful for us. We usually sat in the benches by three mostly, and when he pulled someone out of the bench and had to go to the podium, the other student had to stand up and step out of the bench again, and that's how it was. Otherwise we had the director teaching us proper writing and music classes and we had to go down to his office to fetch his violin, and once it happened that I went and brought the violin, put it on his table and one of the boys threw a twenty haller coin into the instrument, and he started playing and it didn't work, and he was so upset that he cracked the string and broke ihis fiddle stick. That's how we were."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Třešť, 28.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:56:38
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Liberec, 24.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:55:39
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 3

    Liberec, 10.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 52:08
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He witnessed the last public execution of a woman. A Nazi was hanged near the Třešt‘ chateau

Serving in the army
Serving in the army
zdroj: Archiv Miloše Nevorala

Miloš Nevoral was born in the village of Třeštice in Vysočina on 1 September 1929. He grew up with four older siblings, a sister and three brothers. He remembers the first President T. G. Masaryk. He took part in a bonfire in the President‘s memory at school in September 1937. After school, he began working on the railroad in 1944 where he experienced sweep raids at the end of the war. An uprising broke out in nearby Třešt‘ on 5 May 1945, but the Nazis suppressed it. Among those executed were four of Nevoral‘s older schoolmates. In September 1946, he witnessed the hanging of Herta Kašparová, who was sentenced to death for collaboration with the Nazis by an extraordinary tribunal, near the Třešt‘ chateau. She was the last woman publicly executed in Czechoslovakia. Miloš Nevoral moved to Liberec at the end of 1946. He worked in delicatessen and grocery stores in northern Bohemia. In 1968, he delivered refreshments twice to the radio station where Václav Havel was working during the initial days of the invasion. He ran the Dunaj grocery store later on. He retired in September 1989. He was living in Liberec in 2023.