“The director of a factory in Jihlava – a German – arrived with an interpreter and quite politely tried to convince me and my brother to go to Jihlava. But as he spoke to us I spotted a swastika in his lapel. So I poked my brother who stood next to me and said: ‘Man, this guy is a Nazi.’ And then the conviction took only two more minutes. Either you go to Jihlava or you go to the Reich. This was four days after the assassination of Heydrich. So there was no other way than to agree with going to Jihlava.”
“When the war ended I happened to be in Svratka town for some reason. Suddenly I’ve heard that the republic had been proclaimed. So I thought, well, there will be a clash – the partisans and the local German garrison. So I ran home to Křižánky which is four or five kilometers. In the forest four boys who probably escaped from the front crossed my path. Germans, fully armed with machine guns and all. I knew German because we learned it at elementary school and used to live among Germans. They were hungry. So I brought them along and gave them food in Křižánky. Well, there were many stories like this one.”
“When I was in Bohosudov there was some monastery there. And they brought the nuns to a factory to produce screws. To that factory. Why am I saying that? It is about how a human being can humiliate another human being. Imagine those nuns in their robes along with a rifleman in front of them and a rifleman at the back. What could those women do? Could they have escaped? No. I then saw them standing by the machines in their robes. I can’t even go on…”
Jaroslav Teplý was born on 27 April 1923 in the village of Křižánky. He learned to craft files which was a very common profession in the village back then. In 1942 he was drafted to forced labor and had to go manufacture files in Jihlava, replacing the Germans who had left for the front. Just before the end of the war he escaped from Jihlava and went home. Ever since 1952 he helped build the branch of Tona Jihlava company in Havlíčkův Brod. Despite being a specialist in his field he had trouble at work because he didn’t hide his faith in God and also because of his refusal to join the Communist Party. For these reasons he was removed from a managing position in the factory in the 1960s. Jaroslav Teplý died in 2020.
