"They sealed his workshop, he took offence to that, and that was the impetus for charging him with so-called profiteering. Speculation is that you speculate for profit. You want to get your benefit, your money, everybody is a speculator nowadays, if they buy a commodity, they must make a profit. He got five years in prison. And mother had to go to jail for pushing the grave cart to the cemetery. They had to let her out in eight months because she'd die there. If she had died in the penitentiary, it would have been a great disgrace to the penitentiary, so they sent her to the hospital. She got facial nerve palsy, lost 20 kilos, even her own daughter didn't recognize her. That was our justice system. And prosecutor Šaňo said: 'This Stehlíček is not very guilty, but we will find something on him.'"
"I was at home, we listened to it. It was such a barrage that we were afraid to look outside. That plane came down from a kilometer and a half away, it was such a pressure wave that it blew our doors off. We didn't go to look, it was like they were shooting up in your room. That was a 30, that was a cannon. The fight was at altitude. The one from Vyškov was attacked at 9,000 meters. Some of the planes went down after Vsetín, here four went down as the Germans were shooting them down. The only one who survived was the navigator. He was nineteen years old at the time and he was navigating a plane from Italy. These were young guys, twenty-one years old, and these guys were flying the planes. Josef Sobotka took them dead to Slavičín. They were buried there. After the war, in the forty-sixth year, they were exhumed and they were transported either to America or to France, where they were buried in the American military central cemetery. So that's how the battle turned out, unhappily."
"My uncle used to fly that lightning. He came all the way from Frankfurt after the war in a jeep in January. He gave me a fur flight jacket. The photo is still in the museum in Slavičina and the jacket is there, I think. He came, brought us dollars. In Prague, in Darex, they bought a beautiful woolen fabric. There's nothing like it nowadays. Then he came once more, and then the communist regime came. He used to sleep in Alcron, otherwise in our place or in Luhačovice. He was twenty-eight years old and the girls were delighted when he sat with them like an American pilot and paid dollars. He survived the war, he wasn't affected. But he said that if something were to happen, you can’t eject from a Lightning. You have to flip it upside down, unbuckle yourself, and drop out. Otherwise, the tailplane would catch you."
"As I was by the strip, I heard a whistling sound. I looked up and saw Heinkels - those were German bomber planes. There were four or five of them, flying slowly. I kept in mind what my father had said: ‘If you see planes and hear bombs whistling, go home!’ So I picked up the pace and ran past this tank here. A bomb dropped on the corner by the neighbors. Three people died there. I kept running - two more bombs fell in front of the next house. There were craters five meters apart, and our entire roof ended up buried in one of them. Another bomb even fell into the weir. I jumped over a fence - and to this day, I don’t know how I managed to do that as a nine-year-old boy. My father shouted, ‘To the cellar!’ And how did I react? I ran straight for the basement - he was already ahead of me. The whole house shook when the bomb hit the concrete - it wasn’t soft ground. The entire place trembled. At the same time, two or three more bombs fell upstairs, right into the room with the workshops."
Jaroslav Stehlíček was born on 26 March 1936 in Zlín. From birth he lived with his parents in Bojkovice, his father Martin worked as a stonemason. During the Second World War the family experienced the battle over the White Carpathians and the bombing of the village. On April 12, 1945, Romanian bombs killed twelve people in Bojkovice, including children, and destroyed houses in the entire street. In the 1950s, his father Martin Stehlíček refused to quit his trade and work in municipal services. The Communists sent him and his wife Maria to prison, and he died in Pankrác. His wife returned home after two years in poor health. Jaroslav Stehlíček was unable to study, he apprenticed a caer mechanic and eventually managed to get his high school diploma at the secondary automobile school. Sister Zdenka was able to graduate from high school and teacher training school because she was injured in the bombing and was a so-called war casualty. In 2023, Jaroslav Stehlíček lived with his wife in the family home in Bojkovice.
Cousins of Jaroslav Stehlíček's mother and John's mother (in the middle). On the left is Jaroslav Stehlíček's mother, on the right his wife. The women are standing in front of Stehlíček's house in Bojkovice.
Cousins of Jaroslav Stehlíček's mother and John's mother (in the middle). On the left is Jaroslav Stehlíček's mother, on the right his wife. The women are standing in front of Stehlíček's house in Bojkovice.
