Zbyšek Středa

* 1919

  • “I knew him (Alois Jirásek – ed.‘s note) when I was a little boy, about five or six years old. I had a friend and his dad was a postman. We, boys, were delivering newspapers to the Master. Well, as boys we were going to him daily, he had a large villa and Mrs. Jirásková was an excellent gardener and she had lots of great fruits there and we were secretly stealing them and she was scolding us. Well, I don’t have positive memories of her.”

  • “Well, we went through it and we received a confirmation that we were allowed to work as managers of an ironmonger’s shop. Well, and about a month later they fired me, allegedly because I was an owner. But I was not the owner, it was my wife who had the trade certificate.”

  • “I can read it for you. Well, to put it simply, they imprisoned me. I was in the Valdice prison near Kladno and in the labour camp in the underground I was cleaning toilets in order to unclog them.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Rychnov nad Kněžnou, 15.09.2017

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:28
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They imprisoned me, and they did not even tell me why

Pilot Zbyšek Středa
Pilot Zbyšek Středa
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Zbyšek Středa was born in Hronov in 1919. He graduated specializing in aircraft construction. He got acquainted with the well-known acrobatic pilot Petr Široký in Choceň, and following his advice, he took up a job in the factory Flugzeugwerke Letov in Prague. He was in charge of construction of an office building in the German Reich, where he spent the entire WWII in the city of Dessau. He met his future wife in Hronov where he was active in amateur theatre. After the nationalization of private property in 1948, their ironmonger‘s shop in Rychnov nad Kněžnou was confiscated. Zbyšek was imprisoned for three years under unclear circumstances and the authorities then gave him an assignment of designing an industrial machine for production of light bulbs. He and his wife were actively involved in amateur theatre for their whole lives.