”That year, in 1953, I was working in the research institute. Let’s not idealize it, it was about the workers’ money. Because they said that there would not be any monetary reform. And all of a sudden, there it was. And it was obvious even before it started, because suddenly all the goods were sold out. For example there was a shop with clothing and all that was left there was the hangers. The anger of the masses exploded on 1 June, when a crowd of laborers gathered on the square, in the town hall and in the court building. Documents were thrown out of the windows. This led to various reprisals. People were banished from Plzeň, for example. By then I worked in the laboratory and we were not touched by all of this. But there was this blue-collar director in our laboratory and when some of our technicians saw all of this happening in the streets, they wanted to join in, but he blocked them in the door and so they slapped him in the face. He said: “What are you doing to me, guys? I just didn’t want you to get into trouble“. But they joined the protesters and later they got into trouble. They had to work in the workshop on inferior posts, cleaning up, etc. But it wasn’t just them who were punished; many more people had to deal with the consequences. The clerks and so on. Even people who didn’t have anything to do with the protests. But there were all kinds of injuries, so they were quickly taken back to the office, because having to cure them from those injuries would be much more expensive. Anyway, they were marked. Not everybody, but the kids of some of them were not allowed to go to university. But this didn’t affect us in most cases. It applied mainly to those, who were self-employed, for instance those who had a small factory or shop, even though it had been already nationalized by then. But still they were enjoying a leading position there in a certain way and this cut them off. These people were evicted within 24 hours from Plzeň, taken somewhere close or far away to the wastelands around the border. They came back after some time. The boys, their sons, they usually had to join the Auxiliary Technical Battalions.”
“So we came back to Plzeň and that’s when the trouble started. Because when my father was transferred to Mladá Boleslav, he rented our house. The contract said that if we needed to come back to Plzeň, the tenant would get half a year to move somewhere else. This happened in the fall of 1938. That tenant was a Jew and he had an exchange office on the square. When he was asked to move out, he didn’t react at all. So we came back to Plzeň and had nowhere to stay, since we couldn’t stay at our home. The Škoda factory was renting an apartment building in the Klatovská Street by then and there were some vacant flats there. These were decent flats, so we took one of them, with a view over Klatovská Street. Then, on 15 March, 1939, the building was quickly occupied by the Gestapo but we were still living there at that time. Those Gestapo officers were greatly amused by our car, which was a Popular. There was this passage leading into a little courtyard and there was something similar in this courtyard as is in Brussels – the Manneken Pis. And when they were drunk, they would shoot at him just for fun at night. That was quite unpleasant. And our car, which we had parked there, every now and then, they snapped off a door handle or something like that. It was happening all the time. They also kept urging us to move out because they wanted the whole house just for themselves. My father didn’t give in to their insisting because he was just like that. He also spoke German very well. When he explained to them that the contract had not expired yet, they said to him: ‘And who is that man? Where is he? We will take a look at him’. If he had told them that it was a Jew, then... But he didn’t tell them. Unfortunately, that man didn’t avoid his fate anyway. But it wasn’t our fault. So we had to stay there with the Gestapo men and it had bad consequences. Before the Gestapo headquarters were moved to the embankment, where the building of the police headquarters that was occupied by the Gestapo later on, was located, they held their interrogations at the building where we lived. Some of the interrogation rooms were right next to our apartment. When they were interrogating somebody, one of the Gestapo officers came to our flat and rushed us into the kitchen which was the farthest room in the flat. He sat down in front of the door and put a gun in his lap. We had to wait in the kitchen until the interrogation was over. And Jews were already being beaten and held prisoner in the cellar. Afterwards, when Epstein finally had to move out, we moved in our house again.”
“When the alarm sirens started blaring, all citizens had to take cover in the shelters. As soon as the sirens started, we left our house. It was said, based on experience in Germany, that multi-storey houses can take more than a villa, which is completely demolished by a direct hit. Every night when the air raids came, we would run a hundred and fifty metres down the street, where there were large tenement houses, and we would hide there through the air raid. The raids lasted about three quarters of an hour, then we went back and waited to see if our house was still standing or not. We were lucky that even though the bombs were dropped on the west side of Pilsen, in front of the Škoda factory, our house only had a damaged roof and a on a few occasions broken windows. As boys we would go check, with mixed feelings, whether the school hadn’t been damaged. We also witnessed one pretty drastic sight, in the courtyard of the old grammar school on Nicholas Square - coffins lined up with the bodies of the victims.”
“The bombing by the English took place at night. Since the end of 1943 and throughout the year 1944, until 1945, the Americans bombed also during day time. We stayed at our house but there was this rumor that these houses, if hit by a bomb, will collapse completely. And it was proven. I can confirm, when, who, where and how. It was said that the best thing to do when the alarm was sounded is to get as fast as you can into some big apartment building, four or five floors high at best, and there, with God’s blessing, to survive. And there is this street, let’s say 200 meters long with tall buildings on the left side, Vrchlického Street, but that’s probably not important. Once the alarm was sounded we had our stuff packed and ready, the suitcases, and we set out. Meanwhile, the anti-aircraft artillery had already started shooting, the shell fragments bouncing off the sidewalk. We also saw a so-called “Christmas tree” on the sky, which was British flares that served to illuminate the target. When we got to the bunker, we sat down. It was a normal cellar, which had a bricked-up window. Usually, the wall separating the house from the neighboring building’s cellar was smashed and the ceiling and the walls were supported by beams. There were long benches alongside the walls and we were sitting on them, awaiting our destiny.”
Did you have stocks of food supplies there?
”No, we only had what was in our suitcases, for example bread and this kind of essentials. We also had food stamps - they were really important. We were just sitting there, waiting for it to be over. The bombings revealed the real character of people. Having to listen to the bombs whistling above your head is very unpleasant, but experts say that it is actually good when you hear them whistling, because it means that they will miss. But those hits were relatively close and the whole building was kind of rocking from side to side. And now to the human characters. Some people would curse, some prayed, some were just sitting there and waiting what was going to happen. We sat relatively peacefully, because my parents already had war experiences from Russia.”
Vladislav Krátký was born in Plzeň on the 16th of September 1929. His father was a senior officer in the Škoda company and a member of the National Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia. Vladislav attended grammar school at the Mikulášské Square in Plzeň and after WWII he started to work for the Škoda works, where he was in charge of the metal analysis of the research department. After the Communist February Coup of 1948, he was prevented from attending university due to his father’s political affiliation. Therefore, he graduated in chemistry at a technical school in Prague. The Škoda factory, which was renamed to the V. I. Lenin factory, was in the final stages of the operation of a weapon production program, and the military administration requested Vladislav as one of their civil workers. He worked in the department of anti-aircraft cannon production, where he, as a chemist, took care of the final container surface treatment. After the construction of the first nuclear power plant had begun in the Soviet Union, Vladislav became a member of a team of specialists and with a group of another thirty designers and engineers he went to Leningrad, where they contributed to the development of the first Czechoslovak nuclear power plant, which was later built in Jaslovské Bohunice in Slovakia. After he returned from the Soviet Union, he started working in the nuclear engineering department. He was accepted into a university by the end of the 1950’s. Vladislav finished his studies in journalism at the Charles University in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Journalism after five years, with a doctorate. In the early 1960’s, he was hired as the spokesperson of the Škoda works. He worked on this post for a very long time until 2004. He had the opportunity to work with ten directors of the factory. He helped to build a museum dedicated to the Škoda factory and was in charge of Škoda’s archive. He collaborated with the State Regional Archives in Plzeň. Vladislav Krátký died on December 23rd, 2016.
