“A Czech policeman who knew us came to us in the evening. It was before midnight. He knocked and father opened the door: ‘Mr. Vaculík, tomorrow we hand over our duty to the Freikorps and I saw a list on the mayor’s table and your name is among the first ten people who are to be arrested the day after the occupation.’ We started to pack everything and father’s friend was transporting all of it to Lipník. He went two or three times a day. The country’s border regions had been already taken by Germany. It was all terrifying.”
“She got to know Kubiš some time in winter 1937. Kubiš came to the shop where my sister Aurélie worked. She was just standing on a ladder and she somehow got stuck there and he came to her help. He was a very polite man. He helped her get down, then they talked together and they agreed that they would meet the following Sunday. She brought her sister Vilma along with her. There was an instant spark between them and since that time they were in a relationship until 1938 when they parted on Sunday, 28th September 1938. The girls just went to pack things in the shop so that everything could be carried away on Monday. Kubiš talked to their father. Later they did talk to each other, but only after it had become known. At first they kept it a secret, and that’s why they used to take me along when they went for a walk. They would always leave me in Mr. Kulhánek’s confectioner’s shop. Mr. Jan would then always pay for me. A receipt from the confectioner’s has been preserved in his uniform, and a letter from 1st November 1938 was found there as well. Mice have left the substantial things unnoticed. So there is a document which testifies that they were really depositing me in the confectioner’s shop.”
“He was stocky, he laughed all the time, and he had a great sense of humour. When we walked, he would tell one joke after another. I thought I would burst out laughing. He knew a lot of jokes. He had a really nice relationship with me. He even held my hand when we walked and he paid for me in the confectioner’s shop.”
“When the assassination took place, we did not yet know the name, but when they massacred them in the church, father just happened to be in Bzenec and he bought a newspaper there. He brought it home, he called me and he laid the paper on the table. He pointed to the middle of it and he said: ‘You have never seen him.’ It occurred to me immediately. I was twelve years old. I knew that I was not allowed to mention his name ever again. I even never told anybody about him during the period of the communist regime, and I spoke about him for the first time some two years ago.”
Vítězslav Vaculík was born May 7, 1930 in Nový Jičín. The family owned a wholesale business with fruits and vegetables and three shops in the town. It was in one of these shops that Vítězslav’s sister Vilma met Jan Kubiš at the end of 1937 when he served in the 13th guard battalion in the Opava region. Vilma and Jan were then dating for several months. They used to take the seven-year-old Vítězslav with them. Their love relationship came to an end when Germany occupied the border regions of Bohemia and Moravia and Jan Kubiš had to leave the border area. None of the family members heard anything about him until the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Vítězslav Vaculík chose not to talk about Kubiš for over seventy years. The Vaculík family had to leave Nový Jičín overnight in October 1938. The town was in the border area which became part of the German-occupied territory and a local Czech policeman came to warn Vítězslav’s father in the evening that his name was on a list of people who were to be arrested. The family survived the war in Újezdec in the district of Uherské Hradiště and they returned to Nový Jičín only in 1946. Vítězslav completed a trade academy after the war and then he studied the College of Political and Economic Studies in Prague. When he was eighteen years old, Vítězslav joined the Communist Party and he remained its member even after 1990. After graduation he worked at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT); from 1968 he worked in the Research Institute of Telecommunications for three years and then at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague where he remained until 1990. Then he lectured at Charles University for half a year before withdrawing from the public life and moving to Malá Morávka, a village where he resided in 2016. While teaching at these universities, Vítězslav focused on four fields: logic, programming and higher level meta-language programming, technological cybernetics, and philosophy. He published nearly three hundreds of works, and among other, he lectured his students in subjects like history of the All-Union Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism. Vítězslav claims that he used his own, unorthodox approach to these topics, and that he had been even summoned to the Central Committee of the Communist Party several times for that. However, he never had any serious troubles, because several high-ranking politicians were protecting him thanks to his expertise.
