Jaroslav Spurný

* 1938

  • "I spent four months there. Velká Hleďsebe, Horní Žandov, Planá u Mariánských Lázně, right in the border zone we crashed. I have to say it was pretty good, because I was in the army and we had a pretty good business. Some of the locals who moved in, who came from Volyn and I don't know where else from, different people came to us when we were demolishing the house. They always gave us something in return. When the house was being demolished, we always had a policeman who would go with the commander and go through the house, because the Germans had all kinds of things hidden in the walls and everywhere. There were all kinds of things in there, but they didn't want the soldiers to get their hands on it. There was gold bricked up, electric motors bricked up, Persians wrapped up in different fabrics, and I don't know what else, because the Germans were coming back and they thought maybe they could get something else out of there. And we were liquidating it all, and the politruk was standing there, and before it was to be run over with a bulldozer, it was to be looked through, what was found there. Some of the locals always told us, 'Throw it over the fence here, boys.' We did it secretly. If they found out, we were in trouble."

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    Olomouc, 04.06.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:28:28
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We took apart what we could use and bulldozed the rest

Jaroslav Spurný during the compulsory military service
Jaroslav Spurný during the compulsory military service
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Jaroslav Spurný was born on 15 February 1938 in Kroměříž. In this town he also experienced liberation in May 1945. After the war the family moved to Olomouc. During the collectivization his uncle Antonín Spurný from Senica in Hana was imprisoned for several months. After studying at the Industrial School of Chemistry in Přerov, Jaroslav Spurný joined the basic military service. As a soldier, he participated in demolition operations in the border villages around Mariánské Lázně for four months in 1958. After the war, he joined the Farmakon branch in Olomouc, where he eventually worked in various positions for forty-two years. After retirement he became a member of the Association of Nature Guards of the Czech Republic. For twenty-five years, he has been regularly going to Litovelské Pomoraví, where, in addition to his nature protection guard duty, he takes care of dozens of birdhouses for nesting small songbirds. At the time of filming in 2022, he was still living in Olomouc.