Jaroslav Vávra

* 1933

  • "At the beginning of May I remember that the Russian Liberation Army arrived. I was walking with my father in the sandpit and we saw tanks, a car and horses coming from Rana. We went to look at the road below Cervenak and we saw German soldiers. They stopped in Dobromerice, so we went there and by the speech we understood that we understood something partly. That was strange to me, German soldiers and that I understood them. I had the experience that whole platoons of soldiers from Louny came past us to the shooting range in Lenešice. Once it started to rain and a platoon came into our house to hide from the rain, and I didn't understand them. And these ones I did, so it was strange to me. Then I learned that they were Russians in German uniforms. There were Armenians working in the sugar factory in Lenesice, in April, May, and they were also in German uniforms. They said that then they handed over the guns to someone in the village. That time was so wild."

  • "That was back in '45. I didn't see the death march directly. They went from Postoloprty through the region of Lenešice and then again to Rana. They just passed through the region of Lenešice. We lived next to the cemetery, so as a boy I used to look over the wall at the morgue. I saw about five prisoners shot. The gravedigger was burying them there, still in his scratchy uniform. I saw him grab his coat and carry it in one hand. He buried about five of them. Supposedly, I heard, one got saved. He jumped into a ditch somewhere along the road. They were supposed to shoot eighteen of them near Postoloprty. There is a plaque at Bohosudovo that says that the death march went that way."

  • “When in the April 1945 the so-called death march also went through Lenešice. These were people who were locked up in a concentration camp, so they moved that camp from somewhere in Germany, and that camp went through Postoloprty, through Lenešice and turned up to Rana, and from there they got to Bohosudov. They passed through Lenešice here along Dlouhá Street, immediately turned around and immediately went across the track as on Rana. They only took a tip through Lenešice and then up again and came to Rana, and they were already in the Sudetes again, so they didn't stay long here, in Bohemia. I saw that here, supposedly here in Lenešice one of those prisoners escaped. He jumped into a ditch somewhere and crawled into the canal and so we saved his lives. Otherwise, I saw here, maybe five of those people were shot. So I saw, just because I was at that cemetery, so I was always curious, so I always looked over the wall, we were right away, I looked into the cemetery from the garden, so I saw how the gravedigger was burying them. He grabbed him by the ragged rags and carried the man in one hand.”

  • "We were simply assigned to the border area. It was the so-called Sudetenland that was taken, that territory, the Germans occupied the so-called Sudetenland. We were right on the border, Raná was already German, Břvany was already German, Sudetenland, Nečichy, what am I talking about, here Břvany, it was also Sudetenland, then here to Postoloprt, it was all Sudetenland, it was just that it didn't belong here anymore. We were Böhmen und Mähren, Bohemia and Moravia. So, that's how it was. And at that time, when it was being cleared out, these people who were like our people, Czech people, when they didn't want to so-called socialize, when they didn't want to sign the accessories to the Germans, they were deported to the so-called Bohemia. Therefore, the refugees were driven here, that was many people. Just as they are fleeing from Ukraine today, so back then they were fleeing from the border here to the Czech Republic. We still had very little of that space, but I remember that there was also a teacher there, and my dad sublet him too so that he would have a place to stay."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Lenešice, 16.11.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:14:43
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Louny, 18.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:25:19
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

He spent his childhood on the border of the Protectorate. He saw the victims of the death march and met a survivor of the Postoloprty massacre.

Jaroslav Vávra (en)
Jaroslav Vávra (en)
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Jaroslav Vávra was born on 7 February 1933 in Louny, but he lived his whole life in Lenešice, where his parents had a small farm. After the occupation of the Sudetenland by the German Reich, Lenešice found itself on the borders of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Vávra family rented a room in their house to a teacher who was forced to flee the Sudetenland. In April 1945, a death march passed through Lenešice. The Vávras lived next to the cemetery and Jaroslav Vávra watched the burial of the prisoners who were shot. He also witnessed the air raids of the depth pilots and the liberation of Lenešice by the Red Army. From the first grade he attended Sokol, and after the war he joined the restored Junák. After the burgher school he completed a one-year apprenticeship course and became a carpenter. In 1953 he joined the anti-aircraft artillery in Vysoké Mýto. He served first in the kitchen and later transferred to the railway army, where he completed a diving course. He laid cables on newly built dams or helped remove underwater obstacles. After the war, he started working for the Geological Survey, and after the Velvet Revolution he took up carpentry. For several decades he was a member of the tourist club in Louny. In 2022 he lived in Lenešice.