Bohuslav Pavelec

* 1937

  • "Because as boys—how old I might have been—back then after the war, we started the Quick Arrows, if you know the stories, and we were readers of the Quick Arrows. Therefore, these different tramp settlements were formed and these groups were formed, the Gray Beavers. So we some leader who formed us in the street, as if we could become members of the Quick Arrows reading club. So we registered our club in Prague, it was officially registered. We were called the Wolves from the Highlands. The leader created a cry for our group, that I remember to this day: 'Wolves from the Highlands, boys from the wilderness they don’t know any fear. We take our word always seriously. Our motto is health, strength, love of country, honour and faith.' That was our cry. Now we walked, the women embroidered our flag with the wolf, with that head, and we used to go to Malý Beranov, where the rock is, if you know it there, there is a railway line and a river on the other side. There is also a stone base there, so we camped there, we used to go and camp there. And we hunted our good points there, which were called little beavers."

  • "Because my first wife, who died, was Austrian, her parents were in Austria, and her aunt kept her here to be brought up. Well, she worked in a company in Jihlavan, so I talked her into it at the time. And when we were just going somewhere, she already had a green card, a foreign citizen. So there were always problems with that at the border, because they always called her, why was she going on a trip somewhere in a bus with Czech workers, we went to Hungary, for example, and so on. That's how she dealt with it a little bit of trouble with her nationality."

  • "And from that corner to Fybiška, there was a big wall and we lived behind that wall in such a house. They started... the Germans came, they brought prisoners who started digging ditches from that wall to the other side to the houses and they made a kind of a ditch, because a barricade was supposed to be built there. Well, they built it there, planted such strong trees on both sides and poured gravel between that; it was a kind of defence, this barricade. In addition, we as boys - the women always greased a slice of bread, they wrapped it in paper for us and we were supposed to take it to the prisoners. That they put it under our arms and we, like boys, went. When they were not looking, we dropped it in their ditch, and they hid it right away. So that's how we were acting as heroes."

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    Bítovčice, 25.11.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:10:30
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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As boys, we were curious and wanted to know what was going on

Bohuslav Pavelec (en)
Bohuslav Pavelec (en)
photo: archiv pamětníka

Bohuslav Pavelec was born on January 3, 1937 in Opatov, Moravia, but grew up in Jihlava. He experienced the end of the war as an eight-year-old boy and closely observed the digging of trenches by the prisoners in their street, the bridge destroyed by the partisans or the arrival of the Soviet army to relatives in the countryside. After the war, he became a member of the Quick Arrows reading club, went camping with his friends and hunted beavers. He trained as a machine mechanic, completed the military service in Prague, Prešov and Prostějov. He worked at the Jihlavan company almost all his life, where he also met his future wife. She originally came from Austria, so she had an Austrian passport, which caused various inconveniences, especially when traveling. His lifelong hobby is airplanes. In 2022 he lived in Bítovčice in South Bohemia.