“When Russians arrived to Kyšperk, four more people lost their lives. What happened was that a scouting party which rode in the first position somehow got into a convoy of Germans who were running away. The Russians wanted to ride forward and they probably did not notice that they were among Germans. The German commander, on the other hand, was staring at soldiers who were trying to push through his convoy. When he found out that they were Russians, he shot them.”
“Four children were left behind the family. The Gestapo did not take them and my grandpa took care of them. Later, my aunt’s sister moved in to grandpa’s as well. She was handicapped, she had a humpback, but she was a very kind woman, and they even managed to work in the field together with grandpa. Germans sealed the house of those who were arrested and it was prohibited to enter there. However, we boys noticed that a cellar window was left open and we crawled inside the cellar and we carried all the food over to grandpa’s. If the Germans had discovered it at that time, it would have been very bad.”
“The way it was… I received a job placement in Turnov, but originally, there were two of us who applied for a position of an assistant lecturer in the department of precision mechanics, and when they told me that I would need to leave the church in order to get the job, I let it be. Now what was I to do with the job placement? The company in Turnov wanted me to arrange my military service to be postponed, but I didn’t want to do this because I was already a few years older, and therefore they told me that they were not interested in hiring me. I was therefore allowed to start working in the place where I got hired.”
Jaroslav Vondra was born March 27, 1933 in Proseč. His father was a clockmaker and he already had two grown-up sons from his first marriage. Jaroslav’s mother was a seamstress. In 1936 the family moved to Kyšperk, present-day Letohrad, where his father owned a successful clockmaker’s shop. However, he suddenly died in 1944 and Jaroslav’s older brother who did not have his own family took over the trade. Jaroslav learnt the clockmaker’s trade after the war and in 1951 he began to study a two-year Secondary School of Fine Mechanics and Optics in Přerov, which he completed with a master’s certificate. Then he worked in the Chronotechna company in Brno for a short time, and while there he also began to study Secondary Technical School For Working People. He later changed his study to a full-time course and in 1955 he eventually began to study the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) in Prague. He completed his study in 1960, when he was expelled from his job as an assistant in the ČVUT faculty due to his religious faith. Jaroslav therefore began working in the department of measuring technology in the Research Institute of Thermal Technology in Prague-Běchovice. He worked there until autumn 1968 when he transferred to the Klokner Institute - research institute of the ČVUT. In the 1970s he was involved in the introduction of computer technology to the measuring department. He still collaborates with the Klokner Institute today.
