“I was in the Soviet Union during the war, I fought on their side, but I didn’t realize what would come here.”
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Jaroslav Grosman was born on the 13th of August, 1924 in Roztoky by Jilemnice. In 1944, he was drafted into forced labour at the Daimler-Benz factory in Nová Paka. During work, he took part in sabotages, damaging the Nazi war industry. After the sabotages started to be investigated by the Gestapo, Grosman and his friend Horáček fled from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia through Slovakia into Poland, with the aim to join the fighting on the Eastern Front. After crossing the front, they were captured by the Red Army. The Soviet secret service, NKVD, accused them both of espionage and sent them to a gulag. They managed to escape during the transport and later joined the Czechoslovak army corps. Grosman served in the infantry and he took part in the fighting at Dukla in September 1944. He was wounded in combat. On his return to the battlefront, he was assigned to signaling. In 1948, he refused the ideology of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and emigrated. He accepted an offer from the American secret service to become an “agent-walker.” While fulfilling a special mission in 1948, where he was supposed to take part in the kidnapping of the former minister of justice Prokop Drtina, Grosman was betrayed by one of his accomplices and arrested by State Security. Grosman was brutally “interrogated” and sentenced to 20 years in prison and he lost his property and citizenship rights. He was not released until 1963. He spent the rest of his life in Roztoky by Jilemnice, doing menial labour. State Security kept him under surveillance right until 1989. He passed away on April 2nd, 2012.
