Jan Pils

* 1935

  • "We arrived in Budějovice. I hated the train, so did my sister. And now they called us and put them in front of the table like this. My father said, 'Look, you stand in front of me and when I pinch you in the ass, you start crying.' I cried almost before. At first, the conversation was so normal calm - gracious lady, dear sir. And then it rumbled and my father pinched me. I don't know how they came up with such a clever trick. So I started crying, my father knew my sister would join. And it was not possible to continue persuasion. I have seven challenges at my disposal: Come to Budějovice on a certain day. Our parents were always able to influence it in some way that we went to Budějovice only once."

  • "I experienced the liberation very intensely. People were running along the Budějice-Krumlov road, an awful lot. And one fine day, somewhere in the distance, someone shouted, 'The Russians are coming!' And when it arrived, the Russians are coming, so I was with my grandparents. They lived on the left side of the road, we, Dad and Mom, and we lived on the right. Well, these already exhausted people already still managed to squeeze the best out of themselves. And those were scenes that are a bit imitated sometimes somewhere in a movie. It was dramatic. I remember a carriage, it was a military car pulled by horses and, a coachman. The horses were in a good shape and a prisoner wanted to hang on the car who had his leg in plaster. The coachman beat the horse and the poor man who wanted to hang himself. It was out of the question for me to get into the darkness across the road. So we agreed that I would sleep with my grandmother. A dramatic scene. The next day I woke up, the road was absolutely calm, no trace of any human being. But the sewers were full."

  • "I don't remember much about escaping from Krumlov, maybe I was three and a half years old. But I have an image in front of me where a group of people were sitting in an attic room and I could smell a strong arome. I would recognize the smell even now, the one of unwashed bodies. That was the only memory. I know what my mother and father said. The sad thing was that more Germans were fleeing from Nazism, from Hitler - they were afraid of him. They were of a different political belief. And when the Germans of a different thinking were fleeing from Krumlov, they sent them back to the Germans´ hands in Budějovice.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Český Krumlov, 13.05.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:26:21
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The smiling faces of the American soldiers radiated: We survived the war

Jan Pils was born on March 30, 1935 in Český Krumlov. His mother was of German nationality, the father of Bohemia, so the family did not avoid ethnic problems in the pre-war and war period. After the signing of the Munich Agreement, the family moved from Český Krumlov, but returned at the end of the war. In the spring of 1945, Jan intensely perceived the currents of fleeing Germans and the arrival of the American army. He worked as a dental technician all his life.