Vladimír Korčák

* 1924

  • “Dr. Köning, the liaison between ÚVOD, was arrested in the middle of December 1941, and Mr. Satran was arrested by the Gestapo on December 20th. Mom learnt about it and she sent me with this information to my father to the editorial office of the newspaper Venkov. On December 21, three days before the Christmas Eve, the Gestapo stormed into our house in the afternoon and they arrested mom and dad and took them away. Only fourteen-year-old Igor was at home. Bohouš and I were buying Christmas presents and a Christmas tree and we only returned home in the evening. We - fourteen-year-old Igor, seventeen-year-old Vláďa and nineteen-year-old Bohuš -remained alone without parents until the end of the war. We have never seen mom anymore. When he returned home from the concentration camp, dad told us that when he had come home that afternoon, the Gestapo was already in the apartment and there was Igor, and they made him sit with his hands placed on the table. Mom had already been taken away. Dad asked them whether they would allow him to give them books which he had bought as a Christmas present for us. The Gestapo man allowed him to, but dad had to throw the books on the floor in front of him.”

  • “We knew that he was imprisoned in the Pankrác prison, but only Gestapo could issue a permit to visit him. That meant that we had to go to the Petschek Palace, the headquarters of the Prague Gestapo. The massive building of the former bank is located on the corner of present-day Opletal Street and the Political Prisoners Street. Today it is difficult to describe the feelings of anxiety, fear, hatred and desire for revenge that we felt just by looking at the place where, as we well knew, the Gestapo was interrogating and torturing hundreds of our people, often for trivial reasons. Sometimes just for few words. When I already made the decision, I had to overcome those feelings and I also had to come up with a reason why I requested to visit him. The only idea that I had was that we did not know where our parents had placed the slip from the laundry shop. I could not think of anything better. Armed only with my weak knowledge of grammar school German I set out to the centre of the Nazi reign of terror. With my stomach tight, I entered the palace. There was an SS man in a black uniform with a submachine gun standing on each side immediately behind the entrance. There was a third one sitting by a desk and I had to tell him why I had come. They sent me to the left on the ground floor.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    osada Brnky, 14.09.2013

    (audio)
    duration: 47:34
    media recorded in project Soutěž Příběhy 20. století
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

A difficult situation in life either breaks a man or it strengthens him. We did not allow them to break us

Vladimír Korčák
Vladimír Korčák
photo: Pamět národa - Archiv

Vladimír Korčák was born on May 28, 1924. During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during WWII his parents became actively involved in the resistance against the Nazis. They worked with the illegal organization ÚVOD (Central Leadership of Resistance at Home), and they formed their owned resistance organization called Český Kurýr (Czech Courier), which also published an anti-German magazine of the same name. Vladimír’s parents were arrested in December 1941. They were interned in the Pankrác prison in Prague, in the Small Fortress in Terezín and then they were deported to concentration camps Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Vladimír was meanwhile drafted to do forced labour. He eventually worked in the factory Mikrofona in Prague. His mother has not survived the suffering during the war and his father returned from the concentration camp blind. Vladimír graduated from the faculty of medicine and he worked as a surgeon in the University Hospital Královské Vinohrady in Prague.