Jaroslav Roučka

* 1925

  • “Well, this is where they shot a gendarme officer. He was disarming the German soldiers and one of them shot him with a machine gun. I didn’t see it with my own eyes but they said that it was perceived as dishonorable by the German soldiers to be disarmed by civilians. He had a uniform and they shot him. He has a memorial plaque installed on the firehouse, in the street where they shot him.”

  • “Well, we saw an ugly event in Volyně. We were above Volyně and we saw an air raid on a train station by fighter planes carrying light bombs and flying very near to the earth. They dropped a bomb on the train and it went up in a cloud of black smoke. We saw pieces of wood flying around in the air. Then we went down the hill to look at the station and that was something. It must have been a refugee train, loaded with Germans fleeing from Hungary in fear of the Red Army. It was a mess. Corpses dotting the ground, there were dead people everywhere. The doctors that treated the wounded resembled more butchers. People were lying around unconscious and the railway tracks were bent towards the sky like a sled.”

  • “A drunken soldier went to the parsonage with a gun. He pointed the gun at the parson. Then he somehow ran away and walked to the other side of Čkyně. He came to somebody’s house and pointed his gun at him as well. The incidents had already been reported to the military police. The guy living in that house had somehow escaped him and by the time the police came to the house, he was just running out the door. As it was already dark, the policeman thought the soldier was escaping and shot him in the arm. It was a clean shot through and they took that guy on a Harley to a military field hospital in Vimperk where he was treated. That guy actually profited from it as he was paid damages for the injury. It was a poor fellow.”

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    Čkyně, 11.11.2013

    (audio)
    délka: 01:33:35
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Liberation of Western Bohemia by the U.S. Army in 1945
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People were lying around unconscious and the railway tracks were bent towards the sky like a sled

roucka orez 2.jpg (historic)
Jaroslav Roučka

Jaroslav Roučka was born on May 23, 1925, in Šumava, in a family of a farmer in the village of Čkyně. His childhood was strongly affected by the economic crisis which caused a significant loss of employment opportunities in the region and also by the death of his father in 1931. The family farm was then taken over by his older brother. Shortly after the constitution of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Jaroslav Roučka started an apprenticeship for a farrier. In 1943, there came a further blow to his family when his mother was arrested for storing 20 kg of wheat that she hadn’t declared to the German authorities. She returned from the concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. After the breakout of the uprising in May, J. Roučka volunteered for the resistance group Šumava II and participated in several operations, notably the disarmament of groups of German soldiers. He also patrolled near the village. In 1947, he enrolled for military service where he spent the February coup. After returning from service, he married and started working as a farrier. At the turn of 1959/1960, he began working in the timber business, where he remained until his retirement. He and his wife raised three daughters.