František Lehejček

“In the afternoon I returned home by train from Jindřichův Hradec and the Gestapo was in our house. It was in 1945 at the end of the war. They were looking for a radio transmitter or they wanted to know where it was. It was a transmitter for the Voice of America or the London Calling. The transmitter was in the glass factory in a village behind Počátky, because they had a tower. A receiver was installed on that tower. I arrived home from school and the Gestapo men were there. They slapped me on my face several times and asked if I knew where the transmitter was. I replied that I did not even know what it meant. They asked dad and when they found out that he was deaf, they took his younger brother Karel with them. They went to his place, and later we learnt that they arrested him. Afterwards we received a document saying that he was dead and that he had died in a gas chamber in Terezín, although we were not Jews. The vast majority of people in Terezín were Jews, but there were other people, too. People who had been arrested by Germans were interned there.”