"I got into big trouble. It was such a stupid thing to do. It's all statute-barred now. Our whole company was supposed to go on guard duty at the gate, guarding the ammunition. One 'clever' guy thought, let's try and figure out if those Russian submachine guns can shoot through the wooden wall of the house we were living in. We drew lots to see who would shoot first, and it came down to me. I shot at the wall, the bullet went through, and the regiment supervisor was on the other side. He took it as an assassination. I was in a big, big trouble! They blocked the whole barracks, nobody confessed. It wasn't until Monday that it came out. At that time, the guys who were in the army had trucks with radios and receivers in them, and our job was to make ground-to-air contact. They had contact with the airplanes and they had electronics. When they wanted to clean it up, they used syringes and they sprayed naphtha on some of those parts. One guy came up to me in the evening and said he was going to help me, he knew how to do it - and he injected gasoline into my thigh with the syringe. He said I was going to get blood poisoning and get sick and it would be time-barred in the meantime. It worked. They had to take me to the military hospital at midnight that night and I lay there for a while. After I had been lying there for a few weeks, I did some work there. See, when the staff went home, nurses and others, and, for example, somebody died and had to be taken from the ward to the refrigerator, they used us soldiers who were still there for rehabilitation. And when I went back to the company, my sentence was time-barred during that time."
"I came home. The door to the hallway was unlocked, I walked into the hallway and there was a coffin with a dead body in it. It totally freaked me out. I ran away and didn't want to come back. At first I didn't understand; then I realized it was my father. Luckily the house had windows low over the sidewalk, so I crawled through the window while he was there in the coffin. Then I remember his funeral. They used horses then - four black horses, and my sister and I followed the wagon to the cemetery. My mother and my guardian followed us and it was pretty sad. My mother broke down there and we cried like a cloudburst."
"When the Russians approached from the east, everyone was evacuated from Uherský Brod to Maršov, a place in the woods near Uherský Brod. When they came back, the house had been bombed. The Russians had bombed Uherský Brod and - strangely enough - the bomb didn't explode. It smashed through the roof, through the ceiling into the living room, through the piano, and stopped in the cellar. Weirdly, there was a chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the living room and it remained almost intact. My daughter now has the chandelier here in Sweden, and we had it repaired. I have a picture of the house, what it looked like when it was bombed."
Jaroslav Jerry Piják was born in Zlín (known as Gottwaldov from 1949) on 21 April 1946. His mother Ludmila (born in 1919) was a housewife and his father Jaroslav (born in 1914) worked as a proxy. He grew up with his parents and older sister Ludmila in Uherský Brod. At the beginning of the 1950s, his father was arrested for alleged involvement in anti-communist leafleting activities, which took place at work, Sběr. Together with seven other employees, the father was sentenced to two years in prison in a show trial. Shortly before the end of his sentence, he died in prison under unclear circumstances. In the 1960s, having completed a high school of construction and then his compulsory military service, Jaroslav Jerry Piják worked as a road foreman. He decided to leave Czechoslovakia permanently shortly after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. He and his future wife Anna legally travelled to Vienna in November 1968 and then emigrated permanently to Sweden. They regularly visited Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution and the Czech Republic afterwards, but Sweden remained their home. Jaroslav Jerry Piják and his wife Anna lived in Täby, Stockholm in 2024.
