“Well, just as I was taking it out of the closet, I saw the police agents running around the courtyard. I realized that it was too late to run back to the barn because I would have to pass the courtyard. The entrance to our house was from the street. Someone started knocking on our door and my mom went to open the door. I stood in the hallway with pistols in my hand. I had three of them. The only thing that came to my mind was that I had to hide them away somewhere. I didn’t know where. There was a huge blanket in our kitchen because we used to sleep there as well. I hid it under that blanket. The next moment, they were already in the hallway. They came to my dad: ‘you’re Mr. Kopáček’? He said: ‘Yes, I am’. ‘And do you have a son’? ‘Yes, there he is’. I was still in my topcoat, dressed the way I came home just a few moments earlier, my belt buckled this way, and I hadn’t managed to hide it all. It was too late. So they immediately pulled out an arrest warrant and since that moment I was arrested. They also searched our house and of course they finally found the guns. That put a part of the guilt on my parents as well because the guns had been hidden in my parents’ bed. It was their bed. I told the police that it was me who put the guns in the bed. They also searched the closet of my grandmother where they only found a pistol clip. That was very fortunate because this led them to believe me that I was hiding it in my grandmother’s cupboard. My grandmother was already more or less tied to the bed at that point. She wouldn’t open the cupboard every day and I knew that. So why would she hide a pistol clip there?”
“My parents weren’t present, of course. They couldn’t be. They had to wait until the verdict. We were ushered into the courtroom like rabbits and that prosecutor yelled at us: ‘Here they are, these criminals who want to murder our women and children, our mothers. They were stealing the livelihood, setting hay stacks on fire, drilling holes into the storage tanks at the train stations just to harm our national economy’. He yelled out all these things and demanded the death sentence for us. Well, the paragraphs in the laws were unfavorable towards us as we had been keeping those guns at our homes. Paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 was high treason and espionage and the sentences for these acts were high. It was from 15 years to life imprisonment. And the sentences for espionage were even harsher – life imprisonment or capital punishment. He proposed the death sentence for us. They blamed us of wanting to bring the American imperialists into the country to help us. Not for actually bringing them in, but just for wanting to bring them into the country and to shoot the women. It’s not just that he said this. It was all written down in the protocol. The protocol explicitly said that we wanted this to happen. They beat it out of us. If you get beaten badly, you’ll sign anything because you just want the beating to stop. Those who didn’t want to sign the protocol were beaten even harder and some of them were crippled for life. And eventually, they would sign it as well. They had to sign it. This kind of beating changed some of the boys I used to know. One of them lost his memory, another one got mad during the interrogations.”
“They put me in solitary confinement. As I was standing there he gave me two huge slaps. Even a couple hours later, my cheeks were still burning. He said: ‘put him into the cell that bastard’. He slapped me, they closed the door and they left. What saved me was that there was still light when they left. I searched my wallet and ate everything I could find. I ate all the addresses and everything else that could have been dangerous. I chewed it up to tiny little pieces and swallowed it all. I did it very carefully.”
Jaroslav Kopáček was born in 1929 in Střelské Hoštice. His family was helping Russian refugees during the war and was nearly revealed by the Gestapo. After the war, Mr. Kopáček joined the Scout and became a welder. He worked in the Strakonice armaments works where he witnessed the Communist takeover. He became active against the new regime - he kept arms at home, and together with his friends, he was distributing anti-Communist leaflets. He also tried to escape abroad. By the age of nineteen, the secret state police (StB) raided his home, found guns at his place and arrested him. According to the laws of the time, he could have been given the death penalty, but eventually, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. He spent the first nine months of his term in the Bory prison plucking goose down. Later, he was transferred to the Jáchymov penal camp. His parents fought hard for him to be released earlier and they finally succeeded in 1955, when the mood became more relaxed after the death of Stalin and Gottwald. Jaroslav even became employed as a welder in a factory. He married and had four children who were allowed to study - rather miraculously given the regime’s hostility towards political opponents. He had been carrying Scout magazines and the Solidarność magazine across the border from Poland. He was a member of the Confederation of political prisoners and he’s active in the Scout. Jaroslav Kopáček died on December 2nd, 2019.
