"Everywhere you went, there were already Czechoslovak flags and red banners. But the red ones didn't have the hammers and sickles sewn on yet, the Soviet ones. And they were created so that during the Protectorate the German flags had to be hanged out. And the German flags were a red banner and in the middle a white circle and in the middle was a black Swastika. So people would tear off the white circles with the Swastikas, but because it was already shaded around, you could see it on the flags. But they were red flags!"
"Then when the front approached, my maternal grandparents lived in Soběšice. And there was an aunt and her family, they had four boys and they lived in Soběšice next to the fire station. At that time my mother came to the opinion that in the city, even in those Řečkovice, there would be a hard fight, whereas in Soběšice, it's such a countryside, there it wouldn't be a problem. So then when the front was coming, we locked the house in Řečkovice and came to Soběšice. And there weren't any basement houses there then. They were smaller houses and the only one with a proper cellar was the U Plžka pub. But because people started to be afraid that such small houses got hit... and they had nowhere to hide, they dug up these dugouts on the edge of the forest and basically the whole village moved there. They dug from February, in March they made dugouts and we moved there too, to the dugouts that my uncle and his four boys dug at that time. We moved there in April. Well, we were there one night, and in the morning a German officer came and said that in two hours the place would be empty, that nobody would be there, that they were taking it over as a military base. And that if anybody was there in two hours, he was a bandit, and that he would be shot. So, of course, there was confusion, everybody went to their little houses, and if they could, they went to a pub called U Plžků."
"Now and then there were also people who sympathized with the Germans. So in the second class, Weiss was in charge and he told us all kinds of stories to keep us interested. Their hero was usually some blondie. He was a boy who was winning against all the people around him, but especially against the 'Jews'. 'Jews' in short, that was bad. So this Weiss guy was kind of an anti-Semite. I don't know how he felt about other races and things like that, I don't know. I struggled a lot with German, I was dopey in languages. Somehow I always got along later in life, but I had a lousy memory from a very young age, so I had trouble learning German words. But at that time the family was still relatively well off, so my father got a lady to tutor me in German. The lady came to our house several times. And then suddenly she came in with a yellow star sewn on her coat. And she said goodbye and I never saw her again."
Jiří Bartůšek was born on 30 April 1935 into the family of a senior bank clerk and, due to his father’s profession, the family was one of the better-off until the 1950s. As a young boy, he remembers the anti-Jewish sentiments stirred up by, for example, the head of the municipal school he attended. He used to tell them stories about “Blondie” who always defeated everyone, but most of all he was victorious over the “Jews”. Jiří Bartůšek had problems with the compulsory German, so a hired girl helped him with it. One day she came with a yellow star on her coat, said goodbye to them, and then the witness never saw her again. He also remembers the bombing of Brno and the end of the war, which he spent with his family with relatives in Soběšice. Their relatives - like the rest of the village - dug a dugout at the edge of the forest because they were scared of the bombing. However, they spent only one night there, because the next day they were driven out by German soldiers. After that, the family hid in the cellar of the tavern and, after liberation, they followed their family to Královo Pole. After graduating from high school, he joined the Brno Technical School. During his studies at the university he took part in civilian military training, when he was classified as an anti-aircraft gunner. In 2022, Jiří Bartůšek lived in Brno.
