Bohumila Jindrová

* 1935

  • “In the morning (German officers from our cottage) packed up and headed towards Spalene Porici. But when they reached the intersection, there - maybe they were SS commanders, that (I don't know because) we weren't there - they set up a combat position with intention to shoot at Spálené Poříčí. [But] we had a field there. And someone came to Daddy and said to him: 'So you housed the headquarters [of the German army] and now they have spread out there in the field and will destroy your entire crop…‘ And Daddy picked himself up and followed them. I wanted to go with him. Of course, I wasn't allowed to do that, so I looked out of the garden. I was worried about my dad. And then the Americans arrived ... But first an American plane flew there. And when the Americans went from Pilsen via Spálené Poříčí, they predicted that the Germans would start shooting at them, so they went from Poříčí to Těnovice, came to Hořehledy and took the Germans from the side. But even if they had gone (the original way), they would have to shoot them. That was about six or seven jeeps, each one with five men. As they arrived from the side, the Germans gave up. I ran away to find my dad. So I got to the Americans right now, because Dad was already talking to them.”

  • “When the Steel Project [Pilsen] was founded, Stavoprojekt [Plzeň] supplied the builder, and the technology was supplied by Škoda, saying that it was given only for a while, and that the Steel Project [Pilsen] had to bring up its [own] technology; meaning recruit high school and engineer college students. I just came to the Metallurgical Project Pilsen at a time when the technologists were moving back to Škoda, when the project had its own (technology). And among these technologists was (the general) Tonda Liška, who helped (Mr. Svěrák) with writing a screenplay for the film Dark Blue World. It was one of the few RAF pilots that was not locked up. Because when he came back and was here, he went to work in Skoda. They didn't come for him to lock him up. And when he left the Metallurgical Project [Plzen], our amazing cadre man said to him: ´Look, if you want to avoid being checked, go to lynx and they will not be able to take you.' So Tonda Fox went to lynx and survived.”

  • “I got diphtheria. It was in the winter of 1943. At that time there was a general epidemy of diphtheria and spall. I know that some children even died in our village. I got diphtheria at St. Nicholas and my parents had me taken to the hospital in Pilsen. My grandmother was angry and stopped talking to her parents because she had the feeling that in the hospital I would die and they ought to have left me home. But Dad decided that it was more important that I went to the hospital. There were air raids in Pilsen and we had to go to the shelter. I remember once we got into the shelter, and it was a room equipped with a hospital bed and different medical instruments. There was a child who was transfused because there was blood everywhere. And that was the one time we got to that room. There was a glass door in the diphtheria patients pavilion that halved the pavilion on all floors. And on that ground floor there were German soldiers from the front who suffered from typhoid. Back then we didn't take it seriously, we basically perceived it as fun. … No sick German soldiers were let out from that cover. And they always pounded on the glass a lot, because they already knew what the air raids were and what might happen. They knew much more, and we had no idea.”

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    Plzeň, 14.06.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 02:03:22
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
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Nobody gets me on my knees. I will not be pleading

Bohumila Jindrová in 1951
Bohumila Jindrová in 1951
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Bohumila Jindrová, married Kalašová, was born on 13 September 1935 in the village of Hořehledy near Spálené Poříčí. In 1943 she was treated with diphtheria in the Pilsen hospital and witnessed the bombing of Pilsen. The family was hiding officers of the German headquarters in the cottage at the end of the war. Then American soldiers used to go there and finally there a Soviet commander was housed. Hořehledy were located directly on the demarcation line separating the operational areas of Soviet and American liberators. After the war she moved with her parents to Teplá near Mariánské Lázně, where her father was elected the first postwar mayor. Here also watched the removal of the Germans. When her father died as a result of an accident and neglected medical care before Christmas 1947, Bohumila returned to Hořeledy with her mother and sister, who was born in the same year, where they lost their fields due to collectivization. So they moved to Pilsen, where Bohumil graduated from a construction school. She joined Agroprojekt and went to the displaced Sudetenland to target villages. Then she worked in the Metallurgical Project Pilsen. In 1968 she married Milos Jindra, a former political prisoner in the 1950s. Their daughter Markéta was born a year later. In 1989, Milos Jindra was rehabilitated and a year later he became a member of the Confederation of Political Prisoners (CPP) and Secretary of the Pilsen branch. Later he held the position of chairman until his death in 1999. Bohumila remains a member of CPP and a treasurer of the Pilsen branch.