Jana Chalupová

“Written in Jiřice during the German occupation. In these years there was great shortage of flour, bread, meat and meat products. Josef Salač, a butcher from Kostelec nad Labem, and others, like Bohuslav Kaper, a miller from Lobkovice, and butcher Čejka from Kostelec, were selling, and above all, delivering, foodstuffs to the families of people who had been arrested. They were arrested because they were good Czechs and patriots and because they hated Germans. Most of them were arrested when somebody informed upon them, and especially the butchers were imprisoned in the Petschek Palace. What they were doing to them there was enough. It is still not known who had turned them in. When they caught all of them, the court trial began. Čejka was a coward and the Germans who interrogated him noticed this, and he thus sided with them during the interrogations. They were giving him cigarettes and he was telling them what he knew. But he didn’t know everything. Above all, he didn’t know where the cattle was being slaughtered, and to whom the meat was being sent. Salač was a brave man. He had friends and sometimes he was even slaughtering cattle outside, somewhere on a out-of-the-way meadow. He was thus causing damage to Germans and helping our people wherever he could.”

“At the time when he learnt that there would be a court trial, he asked my grandpa whether he would not take him out of the Avia factory in a lorry. Grandpa got on his bike and he rode to the factory and he walked by the fence trying to see him there. He saw him and he yelled at him. Mr. Salač approached the fence and grandpa told him: ‘Pepík, the door of our house is always open for you. It is up to you how you get out of here. But do it smartly, please.´ As we know from the documents which I have read as well as from Mr. Salač’s narrative, he did not address people who knew grandpa, but he turned for help to certain Mr. Horní, who was going to the factory by car as well, and he asked him whether he would be willing to take him out, allegedly because he wanted to buy a furniture polish for some warden. A warden wanted to get some polish. Mr. Horní replied that he would, but that he would at first need to make a phone call and ask whether he would be ordered to go there. He went to the phone, the weather was rainy and cloudy, and Mr. Salač meanwhile grabbed a paper, soaked it in a puddle with sand, and he covered the windows and lay down under the dashboard in the lorry. Mr. Horní came to the lorry and said: ‘Let’s go!’ They passed through the gate, and since it was raining, the SS men just quickly peeked into the back of the car. They also looked inside Mr. Horní’s cabin, but they didn’t see anything and they said: ‘Go.’ Mr. Salač was thus taken out of the factory.”