“My immediate superior was in Jablonec. I went there and asked them for a release pass. I told them that I’d rather apply for the meal vouchers in the Protectorate. One of them at the headquarters started yelling at me: ‘So you’re saying that the war is already lost? But the Führer has not had his last word! You’ll see!’ To say something like that so openly could have cost you your life. I was just wondering if he was such a fool. But I said to myself that maybe the war might be over in two weeks. I did a mistake and needed to get out of there. So I took my suitcase and set out via Černá Studnice, I crossed the border nearby Železný Brod, crossed Rovensko and in the morning I came to Jičín.”
“I told them that the Russian field police would be here any minute. The soviet soldiers greatly feared the field gendarmes because they didn’t exactly handle them with kid gloves. Therefore the Russians got in their car and were about to leave. But still they were swearing. I had a Belgian pistol and just to make sure, I pulled out a Hungarian hand grenade that I had. I pulled the pin of the grenade and placed it next to their car so if they had shot at it, it would have blown up and ripped their wheel. Thus they were left with no choice but to leave. I still managed to jump behind a tree and to make a movement with my arm as if I was throwing the grenade in their direction, which prompted them to speed up. But what was I supposed to do with that released hand grenade? In the end, I threw it inside the garden of the chateau and the blast thrust the carrots and the other vegetables into the air. Then came Count Ledebour, who was among the greatest notables of the town and he thanked me. His two daughters crawled out of the hay where they had been hidden and the younger one immediately recognized me. She told me: ‘we’ve already seen each other, right?’ (They met each other when Mr. Pirát was working as a slave laborer in Germany and when he was doing maintenance work in an asylum for girls).”
“When the Soviet soldiers were passing through here there was a crowd of people standing by. Me and two friends from the Scout drove the people to shift and the soldiers then went somewhere else.”
I was wearing my Scout badge permanently, even in the time of the Totaleinsatz in the Reich and in the time when Scouting was prohibited by the Communists
A picture of Stanislav Hylmar-Pirát from his Scout member card
Stanislav Hylmar-Pirát was born on July 12, 1920, in Jičín, in a craftsman’s family. Since his childhood, he was a member of a Scout troop and took part in various Scouting activities, such as for example the Jamboree of Slavic Scouts in 1931. He lost both of his parents before the outbreak of WWII and his brother therefore took charge of his father’s business. In 1938, Mr. Pirát voluntarily enlisted in the army and in March 1939, he witnessed the constitution of the Slovak state in the Bratislava garrison. Afterwards, the soldiers were demobilized and Mr. Pirát returned to Bohemia, where he at first continued in his secondary studies. However, in 1942, he was deployed as a slave laborer. In April 1945, he escaped forced labor and went into hiding in a cave that the Scouts had used as a club house before WWII in the Prachov region. He became the leader of a guerilla group named Milíčeves. After the war, as a member of the national police corps (SNB), he was involved in a conflict with a gang of looting Soviet soldiers in the chateau of Telnice nad Labem. Later, he made a living as a designer of pipeline distribution systems of factories. He got married and has two children. His brother Václav was sentenced to 27 months in prison for sedition and the subversion of the Republic in 1959. His brother returned to jail in 1968 but on March 9, 1968, he died of a stroke after he had been transported from custody to a hospital. Mr. Pirát was the bearer of many Scout distinctions and awards of the town of Jičín. He died on June 11, 2019.
