“I still remember how I ran up to the square in the afternoon. From the school next to the church, which is now empty... suddenly a picture of Hitler came flying out of a window on the second floor. If it had hit someone, it would’ve killed them on the street. Our boys were in readiness by then, they took the hospital by surprise, they had weapons there, so they snatched them up. They drove to Benza factory, disarmed the guards and seized the place, then they went on to Siemens and disarmed the place as well. They started taking the Germans and whoever they caught and putting them all in the grammar school. So basically, nothing happened to anyone, at most someone got a bit of lick on the face.”
“Simply put, they went after the shopkeepers. The looters were aided by the police, the people’s militias, and loot they did. They found various things, so they put them on display together with a hamster. Say, they’d display two big cucumber jars with pickled eggs, and things like that. Those were the greatest capitalists and those who exploited the working people.”
“There were English and French staying at Grandpa’s in Studénka, the neighbours down the hill had Russians in their barn. We went there with my mother, took some provisions, bread, rolls, and such. A friend of hers came with us, and without hesitation she took a roll and gave it to one of the Ruskies. What a dance, you’ve never seen the like, they set off like bees and started fighting over it. The Germans had a watch there, and the guard started firing into the air and drove them back into the barn.”
Jaroslav Vágenknecht was born in 1932. His father ran one of the butcher’s shops in Nová Paka. In 1939, shortly before the invasion of Poland, he was a chance witness of the Gestapo arresting prominent citizens of Nová Paka. At the end of the war, when he was enjoying his indeterminately-long holidays just like the other children, he saw transports of prisoners and captured soldiers pass through the town. He and his friends made rounds of the neighbourhood on their sledge and collected clothes and food for the captives. He witnessed the dramatic uprising in Nová Paka, which began on 3 May 1945 and was quashed by German reinforcements the following day. After the Wehrmacht abandoned the town, people began celebrating the end of the war, and on 10 May everyone cheered on the soldiers of the Red Army as they entered the town. The Communist coup in 1948 caused the monument to T. G. Masaryk in Nová Paka to be removed for the second time, followed by political trials, house raids, and the confiscation of the property of small business owners, which was then displayed as a warning to the rest. Jaroslav Vágenknecht’s father refused to join the Masna (Butchery) enterprise in 1949, but in the end he was forced to enter the single food supply chain and was only allowed to sell meat products, not produce them. Jaroslav trained to be a butcher, and in 1951 he began his three-year compulsory military service with the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (forced labour for political misfits - trans.). He never took up his father’s trade. His father sold the family butchery in the early 1960s and was subsequently accused of selling off Socialist state property. After 1989 Jaroslav Vágenknecht was in charge of the town’s chronicle for thirteen years.
