“When Leskovice burned, that was pretty much towards the end. It was in the spring, and the villagers knew that the Germans were in retreat, I couldn’t know that, I didn’t know it. The village of Leskovice, it somehow stood up to them, to the SS. So they shot it up somehow, then they razed it, the village. It was a pretty big village, kind of ordinary; it even had a small train station, the stop was Pacov-Leskovice; it was the first stop on the way to Pelhřimov.”
“Because they never came back, none of them did. There were quite a lot of them at our school, the boys, they all died. One older boy lived there, his name was Jirka Šternů, I was friends with him; he was a Jewish boy as well, so he went. I think only one woman came back, who’d survived, but otherwise the boys, they were as young as I was, of those boys who went to school with me, not a single one came back.”
Jiří Krátoška was born on 2 February 1930 in Pacov. He experienced the war in his home town, he remembers his Jewish neighbours and Jewish school friends, who were deported to concentration camps and never came back. At the end of World War II he witnessed the razing of the nearby village of Leskovice by German soldiers. In 1945 and 1946 he worked as a bricklayer; among other places, he helped build dams for the ponds around Pacov - German POWs from the camp near Pacov also worked on the construction. The witness learnt porcelain decorating at the porcelain factory in Karlovy Vary, but he abandoned the craft some time after the February Coup of 1948 and worked as a stage hand at theatres in Karlovy Vary and Pardubice until his retirement.
