Petr Jankovec

“I stayed in the Škoda company until they fired me for disturbing the Socialist order. Then I worked in different fields as a lorry driver, a sewer worker, and then in the united agriculture cooperative where my schoolmate from grammar school who worked there as a chairperson employed me. The year 1989 found me as a test engineer on the construction sites of nuclear power plants, I worked most of the time at Mochovce and I sometimes went also somewhere where something was being repaired, for example to Slovakia or to a place where the construction was starting which was in Temelín.” - “When did they fire you from the Škoda company?” - “On 30 April 1971.” - “So it was after the invasion of the Republic..." - "It was the last day of the law when they could still do it without notice and without giving any reason.”

“When I saw all of it and came home, it was a turning point for me. Of the people who studied in Russia, only a nark stayed a Communist. No one else. It opens your eyes easily.” - “Could you share some experience from Kharkiv and Soviet society as you got to know it there? What in particular opened your eyes? - “First of all, the way they took care of the war-disabled.” A few completely drunk beggars were sitting from the trams all the way to the tracks. Or the supplying. We did not get to buy a piece of butter or sugar there for an entire year, basically, all we had was what was in the canteens. They dragged us to schools to tell children what it was like in our country. The headmaster told me what to say. He said: ‘Tell them that the Soviet Union enabled you to study at university because there are no universities in your country...‘ And I asked him what he taught. He said geography and history. So I told him: ‘Our technical university is older than your university and when the Charles University was founded, you were still being chased after by the Tatars on horses!‘ What idiots they were!”

“I can vividly remember one thing. We arrived at the reception there, my mother showed them a paper that we were entitled to a visit and that we were supposed to come at a certain hour which was when we came there. We could take some snacks, some food with us. He could not take anything with him, but he could have what he managed to eat. I was waiting for them to escort my dad and I recognized him by his way of walking. It is interesting that I was able to remember his gait from the time he was home. Then we came in, sat at a table, and there was a desk with a Gestapo man sitting at it, basically looking into our mouths so we would not give anything away. The man could speak Czech, a weird kind of Czech.” - “How was your dad doing - mentally and physically?” - “He had lost some weight. Some of his teeth were missing. My mother thought that they had knocked them out.”

“My dad was executed among other things because of his contact with the London government.” - “How do you remember the arrest on 10 December 1941:” - “I had some kind of childhood illness, measles, or chickenpox, and I had to lie down, I had temperatures. They woke me up early in the morning because they were always searching one room and they carried me from one room to the other. Then my dad got dressed. They let him say goodbye to me, so he said goodbye to the family and they took him away. They confiscated many books and we did not find out what had disappeared until God knows when. It was the last thing that we cared about.”

“Josef Fischer was an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and he was the brother of Otokar Fischer, translator, and poet. He was Jewish. He was also in the workers' academy. When he started to wear the yellow star, he decided to go underground. I remember that we were waiting at the station, it was noisy there, it was the winter holiday; we were there with them, my parents and I and we also brought my aunt to look like two families and we went to our cottage which we still have in the Vysočina region. We went about fifteen kilometres from Borová to the cottage with Josef Fischer whom I called Uncle Jaroslav. We got to the cottage, he spent Christmas Day there, and then he left. Then I saw him several times during the visit in the same room, they would always bring him there or he would hand something over to somebody - some documents and I was really afraid my mum would show we knew him. I was a little kid back then, but I already knew that one would get the death penalty for hiding a person who had a warrant out for his arrest and was a Jew.