‘Then I also remember, which is a thing I never recorded in my memoires, because I was ashamed of it. I am not a vengeful person and I avoided that, for instance when they threw the teacher of my class, who collaborated with the Germans, they arrested her, brought her to Konětopy, and threw her into the pond. Some time later they brought her mother and threw her in there too. Then they imprisoned them in the scale house. People were shouting when we brought her wet coat to her. Which was something I was extremely opposed to as a child. Or I wrote in my memoirs that two Germans were tied up at the Čurda family farm and three more were at the monument for those who had fallen during the First World War. What I didn’t write there, because I was ashamed, I was truly ashamed, that they caught three young boys, Germans, they were soldiers, apparently, and they were beating them there. They were crying and they were beating them with the rifle butts. I couldn’t watch, I was eleven and a half and I ran away from there and sat in front of the house and I cried.’
‘On June 13 1944 we went swimming to the lake between Konětopy and Čečelice, it was called “Sokolské koupaliště”, a natural body of water. So we went swimming there and on our way back we saw Germans at the edge of the village, soldiers. They had a machine gun in the middle of the road. They did let us into the village but when I got home everything was locked. So my friends, the Čurda brothers from the farm, and I went to their home, and in the centre of the village, under linden trees, men from the village were standing in line, and the women and we watched from the Čurda family’s kitchen windows. And this Russian man was walking there and pointing his finger at people who gave him food and they brought those people to the local pub and later took them away. About twelve people were arrested during this first wave and I was scared, I recognised the Russian man because he only had better clothes and some sort of a plaster over his nose, because I only learnt that after the war that they needed to get rid of him because he would go from door to door in the village and this Mr Holeček, who was later executed at Pankrác, hopefully we’ll get back to him later, so him, people said after the war that he was on the Russian front and found out that this was not a Russian soldier who defected but, in fact, an informer.’
‘But I do remember that when we went to bed that night, we would sleep in the kitchen there, I had this couch next to the oven where I would sleep and I fell asleep. The neighbours knocked on the door and said: “Housková [to the grandmother], backups are headed towards Konětopy, aren’t you going to hide?” And she said: “The grandfather is seventy-five years old and can’t walk very well, I have this boy here, I’m going to stay.” I fell asleep again and suddenly was woken up again, but this time it was a German soldier pointing a gun at me and two more with automatic rifles were standing in the kitchen, my grandmother was at the door with her hands up. They were asking: “Partisans, partisans?” When I woke up and they saw that I was just a child they left. And my grandmother told me that we were, in fact, going to run away because houses started burning down, three of our neighbouring houses were on fire – the Vinčl house, the Svoboda house, the one where I met the Russian, Ivan, then Filomenka Brůžková’s house, across the street it was Holeček’s house, Slezák’s house, another Slezák family’s house, there were two of that name, and Brůžek’s house. So we started to get dressed, of course, my grandmother put all of my clothes on me, including a winter coat, and I took a picture off the wall that my mother gave me when I was leaving for Konětopy as a child so she gave me that to take it with me – the Stará Boleslav Virgin Mary. These memories are difficult for me… So I took her, put her into the pocket of my winter coat. We were trying to escape, half the village was on fire by that point.’
Lubomír Houska was born on the 16th of December 1933 in Čelákovice. Following the occupation of Czechoslovakia his parents made him move to his grandparents, the Houska family in a village called Konětopy where he finished elementary school and at the end of the war he was a direct witness of the tragedy that befell the village. With his own eyes he saw a Russian collaborator providing information on local residents to Germans in 1944. At the very end of the war he was born a second time – Konětopy was burnt to the ground during the night of the 7thto the 8thof May 1945 by the retreating German soldiers. It was a revenge for a number of German soldiers shot dead by local partisans. Following the war and his studies at an engineering school he worked on many construction projects for several companies. Photography was a great hobby of his and he is the author of several photography exhibitions and vernissages. Lubomír Houska died on May 5, 2023.
