Jaroslav Rainer

* 1940

  • "We were returning just when we won 4:3 actually over the Russians, here actually, and we were returning to the airport and now everyone went crazy, the cars were honking. So, it was such a euphoria, it was wonderful. Suddenly, the people who got together and all of them spontaneously showed that we beat them in sports when we couldn't politically, so actually at least like that. "

  • "So my father normally did that when he came out of the war, because he had to go to war like a German, that's what everyone had to do. However, he was actually a butcher, so he was in the rear as a cook, so he actually had no direct involvement in the war... but he had to go to the war and came normally after the war and had to ask not to be deported. And he had to, because we built a house, or my parents built a house in Vchynice, so he had to buy the half again and then the mayor, some Mr. Kočí from Vchynice, he guaranteed for him that he had no problems in life, so he did not have to be departed."

  • "You know, I was five years old, so what I know is more what my mom used to say or how my parents talked about it, so it was the moments when these people fell down from exhaustion and no one was allowed to give them water. Because a mother, when she ran out and brought them at least a drink of water, the German would normally shoot her, because they immediately came after her with a submachine gun, right, and she was not allowed to come close, not a piece of bread, nothing. So those people were poor, so it was rough, but I can talk about it more as from the parents' story. "

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    Velemín, 04.03.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 56:53
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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They were not even allowed to give them water

Jaroslav Rainer vin his youth
Jaroslav Rainer vin his youth
photo: archive of the witness

Jaroslav Rainer was born on September 26, 1940 in Vchynice near Lovosice into a mixed Czech-German family. During the war, Vchynice became a part of the Sudetenland and Jaroslav’s father had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war, death marches heading to the nearby Terezín were passing by Rainer’s house. After the war, his father was removed from the deportation thanks to the mayor’s intercession, but he could no longer carry out his trade as a butcher. Jaroslav trained as a blacksmith and in 1959 he joined the military service, which was extended during the Cuban crisis in 1961. He worked in a chemical plant and played and trained football in Velemín all his life.