Private (ret.) Jaromír Pasecký

* 1938

  • "It was so done, we moved in August quite soon after the war. It used to be Winter's, or now it's Winter's Street, I don't know exactly. Soon after the war, we had to move into designated homes. So we moved there. We went to the house in Winter street, descriptive number 22. We started living there, there were still vacant flats, so I know that my father told the Masopust family from Lažany if they would like to live there. The Hořák family from Lažany also came to live there and lived there. Dad gave them information that the apartment was vacant. So they moved in. "-" What did the apartment look like after the Germans? Was it furnished? "-" Everything remained in the apartments after the Germans, according to the information I know, so the Germans could take thirty kilos and nothing more. So it was sad, I know people were crying there, neighbours were crying. But such was life, such was the regulation, it had to be fulfilled. I said to my father, 'Dad, why didn't you take over the villa, was everything here in a few bucks?' He said: 'We were not allowed. We got it ordered. ' My father didn't allow that. "

  • "That we were like boys, that we knew each other well. We trusted ourselves as footballers, so they always sent us, for example at Christmas, that we took our service so that they wouldn't say we were relieved. So we went into service, it was such a service just as a backup to the road. That is, we lay down on the way to Shirling. We were there from ten to four in the morning, waiting for something to happen. So different, not regular, it was irregular. So I hear something that someone is walking on the road, that something is making a clapping noise, that it is approaching us. I was the commander of the "shutter", I tell my colleague from Děčín Land: 'Arrest him, who is he?' He said, 'You're crazy, I'm not going there, he'll shoot me.' We let him pass, jumped on him from behind, and immediately handcuffed him. He was scared, we said to ourselves, 'Well, at least this is going to be a week off.' We said, 'Documents!' But there was nothing he could do, he had handcuffs. We took him on a brigade. At the brigade, they told us that we should have read his passport, that he had written in his passport that he was allowed to cross the state border, that he was going from Germany to his sick mother to Karlovy Vary. But we didn't know it. They told us, 'Then you should have checked it out!' But no one trained us for passport checks. "

  • When I was in Liaz and I returned after the war, the comrades came and said, 'We need you, you are good, you are reliable, we need you, you will go to the party. We give you a fortnight to think and we will wait for you, we want you. I say to them, 'Dear comrades, I do not need fourteen days for this, I will tell you now, I will not come to you.' At that moment, in three days, they cancelled my job and transferred me to Liaz down as a three-shift maintenance. And they thought they would destroy me. I took it that nothing happened, I pretended that nothing happened. There were comrades, too, master. And because we were also in Italy with the Slovan, they told us at the town hall: 'You are going to a capitalist country, you must not look at it like that, be careful, they will try to attract you and persuade you.' They told us such "scary stories" at City Hall. They didn't have to tell me, I knew how I was going to behave and what would happen. We returned from Italy and everything turned out well. I came to work and the master tells me, 'You work alone, you will not talk to people so as not to try to persuade them about anything."

  • "We lived through the end of the war in Lažany. At that time, when it was about the fifth or seventh or sixth of May, we hid for two or three days in the basement at Bartošů's. There was an entrance, it was hidden in the ground, we survived there for two or three days, I remember that quite well. As for the next step, that is, I want to say that my friend Jarka Stantejský, who was half a year older, was there with me. He went to first grade with me, he was a good boy. He had a gun, he had a revolver drummer. We were in Lošiny, he suddenly fired. He fired into the ground, it smoked. Then he fired another shot in the direction, I don't know where, either on the state road, where the Germans were already retreating, or towards Pyram. I do not know it exactly. Then, I don't know if it had anything to do with that, there was a Mr. Třešňák shot at Žáček's barn. So we crawled to the village, to Lažany, to tell them that he was shot there. Someone might have found out, because they pulled him out and took him to Turnov's hospital. He recovered well from that because he had a clean shot, no damaged internal organs. "

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    Liberec, 28.05.2021

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Dad oversaw the expulsion of the Germans. I know they were crying, but that was life

At the scooter race, he was first then; Liberec, 1947
At the scooter race, he was first then; Liberec, 1947
photo: archiv Jaromíra Paseckého

Jaromír Pasecký was born on September 24, 1938 in Turnov, the family lived in nearby Lažany. At the end of the war, he and his parents hid with their neighbours in the cellar, and he also experienced air raids in which he hid under planks. His father served as a police officer in Prague, in August 1945 the family moved to Liberec. There, Dad oversaw the expulsion of the Germans. The family got an apartment after them, other families moved to the apartments after the Germans from Lažany. Jaromír Pasecký has been playing sports since he was a child, focusing mainly on football, hockey and athletics. In 1953, his father had to leave the National Security Corps because he was not in the Communist Party and, in addition, had the guild of a First Republic and a Protectorate police officer. In 1953, Jaromír Pasecký experienced how people threw away devalued money after the currency reform. During his young football years, he met coaches Josef Bican and Václav Ježek. In 1957 he went to war, where he played football for the club of the Ministry of the Interior and the Border Guard Red Star Cheb. Sometimes he served in the border area, but he never shot at anyone. After returning to Liberec, he played for Slovan Liberec, he married in 1964. When he refused to join the Communist Party, he was reassigned to a worse job in Liaz. He experienced the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in Liberec, where Soviet soldiers killed his wife’s acquaintances. In the 70’s and 80’s of the twentieth century, he coached the youth of football Slovan, he also travelled with them to capitalist Western Europe. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he went to demonstrations in front of Liberec City Hall. At the Plastimat factory, he saw militiamen ready to strike against the protesters. After 1989, he continued to educate young footballers. He and his wife Olga raised a son and a daughter, lived in Liberec in 2021 and enjoyed three grandchildren. The story of the witness could be recorded thanks to the support of the Statutory City of Liberec.