Jiří Boháč

* 1920

  • "I broke it with a pickaxe, and lo and behold, there was a box there. It was sheathed in metal, I slammed it with the pickaxe and broke it. I broke off the top and found the files. There were about forty files; I gave them to the people that I knew. I kept this and brought it home."

  • "I rode a bike home and kept the bike hidden in a service room. I was going to the room to get the bike, and the station master Mr. Šťastný was standing in the door, with two men in leather coats by his sides. One of them stepped in my way and said: 'Geheime Staatspolizei.' There was no way I could talk to the station master or to them, they took me - one in the front, one in the rear - to the car parked in front of the station."

  • "We came to the flat. There was a Telefunken radio set on the cupboard. There was a device inside the radio that my dad made that let me listen to the news that you couldn't listen to otherwise. (The Gestapo man) came to me, pushed my back, took me to the cupboard and pointed to the radio. I had to take the radio."

  • "If you worked hard, you could work your way up from the pickaxe and shovel to the office, perhaps. People are very demanding these days. Their demands ... Sadly, all they see is the wrong things. Fraud here, bribery there, this is hardly justifiable."

  • "I started at the Gestapo in Budějovice; from there they took us to Terezín, and from there to Pankrác. At first, they took us to those who were to be sentenced first. After the judgment, they sent us to Germany. I went through several camps and prisons there."

  • "They told us we were going to the Straka Academy. They took us to the cellar and we had to wait for an hour. Then those who brought us there came for us. They put on their judge robes in front of us, sat behind the table, and sentenced us. It was a farce. The ex officio counsel could not speak Czech, and didn't even need to. It took less than half an hour. The sentence: Jáchym, Pechman, Prokeš: Zum Tode verurteilt (death sentence)."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Lomnice nad Lužnicí, 27.07.2012

    (audio)
    duration: 02:29:26
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I am one of the few who have their full case file at home

Prison photograph - 1944
Prison photograph - 1944
photo: archív pamětníka, jeho spis

Jiří Boháč was born in Lomnice nad Lužnicí in 1920 and graduated from a grammar school in Třeboň. He was deployed on forced labour in the Reich in 1942 (Steyr, today’s Austria). He fell sick in Steyr and came back home, and had to stay in hospital in Tábor for a month. When he recovered, he worked on the railway in Veselí nad Lužnicí where the Gestapo arrested him in the spring of 1944 for listening to foreign radio. He was sentenced to five years in prison as a member of a group of five people, three of whom were sentenced to death. He was imprisoned in České Budějovice, Terezín, Prague-Pankrác and in labour camps in Bernau, Kaisheim and Aichach. He worked on the railway from the end of the war to his retirement. He lives in Lomnice nad Lužnicí.