Jiří Pavlíček
* 1926 †︎ unknown
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“It was a large long building. They moved us to a different floor. We walked through a passage in the basement. There was piping everywhere, and one of the women began screaming: ‘They are taking us to gas chambers!’ Punishment and more yelling followed. It was horrible. We only calmed down when we got to the prison cell. The wardens there were normal people, and all of them could even speak Czech, although they were Germans.”
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“My sister was getting married in the beginning of 1942 when all this happened. They went to visit her grandparents. They were the parents of my mother, whereas from my paternal grandparents, only dad’s mother was alive. They arrived to the grandparents’ house and it was locked. They looked more closely and there were hasps everywhere. The house was locked and empty. They thus went home and they told us about it. I come from a village which did not have a permanent cinema building, but a kind of ‘cinema on wheels,’ would arrive there one or two times a year. It was always a big event, and lot of people went there. We were in that cinema, and my sister came there and she motioned to us to go home quickly. She told us what was going on: our grandparents were arrested. My grandpa was seventy-eight and my grandma was about four years younger.”
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Full recordings
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Hrotovice, 30.03.2011
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Jiří Pavlíček was born September 10, 1926 in Sudice in the Třebíč region. His father worked as a teacher. There were six children in the family. The Pavlíčeks were distant relatives of the family of the paratrooper Jan Kubiš, who lived in nearby Dolní Vilémovice. During the terror following Heydrich’s assassination in June 1942, Jiří, who was sixteen at that time, was arrested by the Gestapo together with his whole family. At first he was interrogated in Třebíč, then in Jihlava, and after spending some time in prison in Jihlava, the entire Pavlíček family was then transported to the Small Fortress in Terezín. Jiří and his father worked in the so-called Baukommando in Terezín, doing construction work. Since Jiří was only a very distant relative of Jan Kubiš, he was eventually released from Terezín after four months.. He died in Hrotovice near Třebíč.