“The Germans stood my father to the wall already back then in Schönbach. Because he had a service weapon. When things started getting bad between Czechs and Germans, he got himself a legal weapon - as a uniformed employee. The fact is that Germans targeted uniformed employees in the border region especially. One German woman ratted out that Dad had a weapon, so they stood him to the wall and wanted to shoot him together with two others. Nothing happened to any of them in the end. My father was saved by a train conductor, who told the ‘ordners’ [slang from German for someone who maintains order - trans.] not to be stupid, that he needed an engine master for his railcar. He said to let him go and that when my father came back again, they could wait for him then. They accepted, and so Dad got into the railcar and drove off, and he saw there were more ordners at the next station, and the next, and so on, like that scene in the film Slunce seno jahody [‘Sun, Hay, Strawberries’, a classic Czech comedy from the Communist era - trans.] - ‘we can’t stop, we’re delayed’ - he drove all the way through to the end of the Sudetes to the territory under the control of our government. The government didn’t have control of the territory nearer the border any more. Our military kept things clear there, but you couldn’t count on it. So he brought the railcar and its passengers there and then set off to Pilsen. My mother was already in Pilsen by then. She’d fled there earlier.”
“I remember when Dad came home. It wasn’t straight away. The nurses looked after him until about midway through May, and they fed him well. He came home plumped and limping. He hadn’t fully recovered yet. Mum was overjoyed, I stared at him like Baby Jesus, because I’d almost forgotten who he was in that year and a half. He didn’t know my brother Standa at all, pretty much, because he’d been born in April 1944 and my father was arrested sometime in autumn 1943 [sic], or something like that it was.”
“When he was imprisoned, his fellow inmates begged him to confess everything, that the interrogators already knew everything anyway. But the Germans were thorough, and they needed to have the testimony of the head of the group. And because my father didn’t give away any names, they received quite mild sentences, unles they’d spilt too much about themselves. My father was finally given about a seven-fold death sentence for each of the paragraphs [he had violated - trans.]. I won’t even go into much detail about what torture techniques they had, but apparently they placed a person’s head into a press and tightened the screws until the skull cracked; they ripped fingernails off, poured cold or hot water over them, beat the prisoners with a bull whip, punched them, kicked them. For instance, one young boy was kicked up to such an extent that he bled to death by morning. The Germans then wrote that the prisoners died during interrogation or that they had committed suicide. They covered it up well. The Germans were cunning liars.”
Jaroslav Bukovský was born on 24 March 1940 in Pilsen, into the family of the engine master Josef Bukovský, who was sentenced to death for his resistance activities in 1944. His father’s wartime experiences are the main topic of the witness’s recollections. Before Jaroslav was born, his parents lived in the town of Luby (Schönbach at the time) near Cheb. When the Sudetes were being annexed, Josef Bukovský got into trouble with the armed German Freikorps, who wanted to shoot him for having legal possession of a service weapon. His life was saved by a train conductor, who requested him for work duty on a train that took him inland - he did not return to Luby. In Pilsen Josef Bukovská founded a resistance group made up of four railway employees, which was connected to a larger organisation based at the Škoda Works. The main activity of Bukovský’s group was railway sabotage, but they also helped the families of resistance fighters. In spring 1944 Josef Bukovský was arrested by the Gestapo. He survived cruel interrogations and internment in Bory Prison, but in December 1944 a Nazi court in Dresden awarded him multiple death sentences. In February 1945 he and other death-row prisoners managed to escape Dresden during an air raid. After a ten-day ordeal full of hardships, suffering from frostbite, he found his way to his brother in Prague, where he remained hidden until the end of the war. When he died in 1996, his son Jaroslav discovered his memoirs of the resistance and decided to pass them on to further generations. The witness followed in his father’s footsteps - he graduated from the University of Transportation in Žilina and worked in the administration of Czechoslovak Railways until 1993. He devoted his nonoccupational life to youth work as the leader of a tourist group and in other functions. His four-years-younger brother Stanislav is a prominent artist.
