“Before May 4th, people were already rejoicing and celebrating, because the Germans would go away. A Heinkel airplane – I don’t remember the type, but it was a German twin-engine aircraft – flew over and people in Břevnov were on the street and he dropped a bunch of hand grenades on them and many people got injured and killed. We served with an ambulance and so they sent us there with a stretcher in order to bring the people in and so on. We thus went there and as we were coming back, my colleague and I were carrying a woman on the stretcher. She was already dead. The Heinkel plane returned and as we were walking with the stretcher in the crowd of people, the idiot began shooting at us from a machine gun. We could hear the clicking sound as the cartridges were hitting the pavement. We said to each other that if he turned back at us, we would leave the woman there, because we didn’t want to get killed for a dead woman. But he did not fly back. It was the same airplane which then partially damaged the National Museum and the Old Town Hall when they were bombed.”
“As for the tank which was destroyed in Klárov – the only tank, because the Germans then did not dare for anything more... There was an interesting episode related to that. We went to collect beetles near Samarkand. We walked there a lot, we did not need to fear anybody, the area was completely safe and my wife and I would thus often walk back to the tourist base where we had accommodation even late at night. A watchman was sitting there by the gate and he was curious. I don’t know what nationality he was, whether a Tajik or somebody else, they were all mixed together there, especially in Samarkand. He asked me where we were from: ‘Praga, to ja znaju.’ (I know Prague). I was interested how come that he knew Prague. He was the driver of that tank. When the tank caught fire, all the others had to get out through the top door, as usual, but the driver’s exit is on the bottom and he can get out through there. He thus waited for the situation to calm down and then he crawled out and went to join his people. Such a coincidence – Prague and Samarkand far away. And I meet a guy there who was liberating Prague!”
Jaromír Strejček was born October 9, 1925 in Konojedy. He spent his early childhood at the family farm, but the Strejček family had to sell their farm in 1932 and they moved to Prague. Jaromír wished to study a school of forestry, but since he probably would not have been admitted immediately, his parents decided that he would learn the shop assistant’s trade instead. While working in the shop, in October 1943 he was ordered to do forced labour and join the Luftschutz (air defence) and to work on digging shelters and bringing in the dead and wounded after air raids. Jaromír was pursuing his hobby - collecting beetles and studying them- already during the war. In May 1945 he took an active part in the Prague Uprising, and with a group of soldiers under the command of colonel Adamec they took over the Ministry of Defence from German soldiers. After the war Jaromír returned to the shop to work as a shop assistant, and then he went to do his military service for two years. When he returned, the shop had meanwhile become part of the state-owed company Pramen, and Pavel decided to change jobs. He became the director of the museum in Trmice. In the late 1950s he went to work to the recently established Regional Center for Heritage and Nature Conservation, and later to the State Centre for Heritage and Nature Conservation in Prague. He retired in 1992. He was married three times during his life, and his third wife Míla died in 2009. Jaromír Strejček lives in Prague.
