“[As a messenger] I met with the leaders. One time I must have met one in uniform. It was at night, in the evening, there was a black-out back then. He came by car, that made me pretty suspicious already. I was given a password and that the meeting was to be at Palmovka. Praguers know there was a metal toilet and a street clock there. My password was connected to the clock. They were supposed to ask me what the time was and some such. In that way I’d know it was the envoy I was to meet. So I stood there, I didn’t know what would happen. I had been told to stand and wait. Suddenly a car drove up, and I felt a shiver all down my spine. Only Germans, gendarmes, and police, had cars back then, perhaps a doctor or an ambulance, but there were no private-owned cars.”
“An interesting thing was that there was a train waiting at Masaryk Station, and when we were boarding it, there was some organisation there that threw us bread, or dumplings - simply, food. They did that for every transport. The Gestapo wasn’t there any more, it was guarded by German gendarmes. They did try to stop it, but they didn’t chase the people or arrest them. [...] I never noticed anything having been written about this. It made us happy, we were as famished as wolves. It did us good, and we saw that there was someone who cared for us.”
“One time the SS came up with the idea to organise a fighting match between two Jews. They gave them staves, and the Jews had to beat at each other until one of them died. The kapo was charged with making sure they carried on right to the end. Then they had to build a bier, and the Jews had to carry the dead man to Terezín. [Q: Did you have to watch that?] We had to be there for the fight, it was during lunch break. That’s how they treated Jews.”
“[The leader of the resistance group] told me that we have to sabotage production as well. It was up to him to drop something, even though it was supposed to be repaired. Or another thing we did was, even though a product was finished, we pretended to keep on working at it. [...] We did some shoddy pieces, but in such way so as not to attract notice. Otherwise they’d catch us straight away, and perhaps they’d have beaten us into admitting we were sabotaging and that we were organised somehow. [The leader] told me we needed weapons. I promised him I’d try [to get some]. My brother and I had a shotgun and a revolver, which we had hid in a barn at the outset of the war. I think that there were guns in about five or six houses in the village. They were poachers, and I hadn’t heard of them handing in their rifles.”
“Of course I could see he was arrested, so there was no point in denying it. My mate also told me not to deny it, because he had been there at the time. I nodded and that was that. I saved him like that. If they’d have bashed me up a bit more, I might have told on one man from Prague 9, because he seemed a bit... He had a limp. I didn’t know who to tell them about when I suspected that they only had one of them. I didn’t mention anyone else of course, I wouldn’t start telling who all I’d met when they were contented to have the one.”
Bohumil Kos was born in 1923 into the family of a farmer in the village of Mohelnice in Pelhřimov District. He trained as a precision mechanic in Prague. During the war his colleagues from work invited him to join the resistance. He functioned as a messenger in the Prague branch of the Union of Czechoslovak Youth resistance organisation. In April 1944 the group was betrayed. The Gestapo arrested Bohumil Kos and interrogated him in Prague-Pankrác. In July 1944 they transferred him to the Small Fortress in Terezín, from November 1944 to February 1945 he was imprisoned in Dresden. After another short stay in Pankrác he returned to the Small Fortress; he worked in Richard Mine near Litoměřice. His trial never took place and the witness was never officially convicted. In May 1945 he fell ill with typhus. After the war he began attending technical school and passed master-craftsman exams. In the years 1947 to 1949 he underwent compulsory military service. After February 1948 he refused membership in the Union of Liberated Political Prisoners and took no active interest in politics. He did not rejoin the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters until 1968. Since 1955 Bohumil Kos has lived in the Central-Bohemian town of Řevnice, and he is the long-standing chairman of the local organisation of the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters (later the Union of Freedom Fighters).
