Jaromír Rys
* 1927 †︎ 2015
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“I carried on working, I had some material, and I came to Brno. I wanted to go through Southern Moravia, and I needed some help there. I had another classmate from grammar school there, his dad was a colonel. He was in the resistance in World War II. The dad, not the boy. And when we had our grad night, Mr Pelikán told me: ‘Boy, if I was your age, I know what I’d do.’ ‘Colonel, sir, you don’t have to tell me that, I know.’ And he said: ‘You know our Jirka; if you need anything, feel free to ask him.’ And I did. The way it ended up was that he took me to a friend of his in Žabovřesky, on the fourth floor. And around three a.m. suddenly an alert, they arrested me in the blink of an eye. About two years later, at the labour camp, there were some university boys there, from Brno. One word led to another, and I said the name of Jirka Pelikán. Zdeněk Rychtr retorted: ‘Jesus, those were the biggest fuckers ever.’ ‘How come?’ ‘That was a group of university students that ratted on people for money.’ [Q: His father probably didn’t know that...] He didn’t, he’d have possibly killed him if he did. It happened, when I came back years later, we had a get-together at the grammar school. And he came there. We were sitting in some hotel at about two in the morning, the whole group that had come there. That was years later. And I told him: ‘Jirka, get up and get out of here! Either you go, or I do. But I don’t advice you [staying], because I won’t hold back. You’re done in my eyes. You’re a traitor...’ And he left. He didn’t say a word.”
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“I looked and noticed one of the guards. I said: ‘That’s Zdeněk.’ I recognised him. It was my classmate Zdeněk Navrátil. We used to play for the school together - hockey and the such. I thought, surely that can’t be him, he was of the same kind as I was. When lined up in fours, I told the boys: ‘Watch out now, when we set off, I’ll do an experiment. I’ve got a classmate here.’ They said: ‘No way...’ I said: ‘Really!’ [...] So we finally got started and off we went, the roll call was over. When we were about halfway, it was around eleven p.m. Everything was quiet, just the typical echoes of the mine, the usual operational noise. I yelled: ‘Bikini!’ That’s what we called him. Perhaps you heard, the first atomic bomb was tested on the island of Bikini, so it was well known. And the moment I shouted Bikini, like a stroke of thunder, he turned on his heels, stopped, let us walk by, and gazed into our ranks. In the dark. It was him. I waited for what would happen next. I would never go to him myself, obviously, nor he to me. One time I was at work, mining, in the crosscut after a blast, I was shovelling gangue. He came up quiet as a mouse. There he stood. We looked at each other, and I said: ‘Hi.’ - ‘Um, hi... Look, but don’t think - I won’t help you, not a bit,’ he said straight from the bat. To which I replied: ‘You don’t have to worry about that, I’d never ask you for anything, we’re both in different places.’ We agreed on that, that we were on opposite sides. And I never saw him since.”
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“We came to Zbraslav. I know that the road was raised quite high up there, with low houses along it. And suddenly the chain broke while we were crossing the bridge. I looked backwards to check if anyone was coming; he said it’s effed up... So I look around, and there was no one there, just one granny and a lanky, younger kind of fellow standing in front of one of the houses. So I said: ‘Wait, I’ll go and ask them...’ What kind of madness was that to go ask a strange bloke if he didn’t have a chain link... He looked at me for a while like this and then said: ‘You’re on the run, aren’t you?’ I said: ‘Yeah.’ It was do or die. I said yes. Then he said: ‘Wait up, I’ll have a look...’ He went inside the house, and [I reckoned] if he had a phone, it would be done and over anyway. That always brings out the bad side of the problem. Then [the granny] spoke up: ‘You know, he’s my son. He was locked up in Bytíz. He had a shop, and they locked him up.’ He gave me the link, I took it to Honza, we said goodbye to each other, I guess he fixed it and left. [Then the other chap] said: ‘Where are you headed?’ - ‘I need to cross the mountain.’ - ‘Do you have any money?’ - ‘A hundred [crowns], what he [Honza] gave me.’ - ‘Come on then.’ He took me to the crossing, paid to have me cross over, we shook hands, didn’t even say [our names], I don’t know what his name is, I never saw him since. But he saved my life.”
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Celé nahrávky
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byt Jaromíra Rysa v Jihlavě, 20.09.2011
(audio)
délka: 02:44:25
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.
Democracy means a fair amount of voluntary discipline
Jaromír Rys was born on 27 September 1927. He comes from a shoemaker‘s family in Radešínská Svratka, a small village near Nové Město na Moravě. He completed elementary school and then attended a grammar school, but the Nazis closed it down and Jaromír Rys only completed his secondary school final exams („maturita“) with great difficulties in Svitavy in 1948, at the age of twenty-one. During World War II he gained some experience as a messenger for the partisans who operated in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. After graduating from secondary school he decided to go abroad and join the anti-Communist resistance. He successfully navigated the Black River near Klenčí pod Čerchovem and reached Bavaria in the American zone of Germany, where he got in touch with an intelligence team. He undertook two missions into Czechoslovakia, the second time he was betrayed by his former classmate Jiří Pelikán, who gave him shelter but then reported him to State Security. Jaromír Rys was interrogated in Ústí nad Labem and tried in Prague-Pankrác. On Good Friday, 14 April 1949, at the age of twenty-two, he was sentenced to imprisonment for life. All in all, he spent thirteen years in prison. In 1955 he succeeded in briefly escaping from the uranium labour camp Vojna near Příbram, but his flight of liberty lasted only twenty-seven days. He was betrayed by his guide, the brother of a good friend of his, just moments before crossing the border into Austria. Following his capture, his whole family was arrested, including his mother, his father, and his two sisters, one of whom was with child. Held in custody in „Singsing“, Jáchymov District, he was forced to hear his sister crying desperately all through the night. His hair turned grey from the horrific experience. He spent the remaining seven years of prison in Valdice, several years of which was in solitary confinement. Because of his escape, he was not eligible for the amnesty in 1960, but he was released two years later. At the time of the interview Jaromír Rys lived in Jihlava, where he chaired the local branch of the Confederation of Political Prisoners. Jaromir Rys passed away on 21th February 2015.