Jaroslav Pekárek

* 1945

Border Guards, Life along the Iron Curtain, Member of the Czechoslovak People's Army
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    Abolishing high tension wires on the border

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    “Then they began to abolishing. I think in 1965, when they started to take down the wires in the East. So we got some money, so called reluty, there were about seven of us riding a V3 lorry and we took down the wires, put them in a roll gathering it into waste. And of course the columns were also dug out. We were doing that from Český Jiřetín all the way to Kraslics.”

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    So I told myself: "I will make you angry."

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    “So he took me and said: ´Show me the civic identification card!‘ So I did. ´Here you got no long hair, so you can either get a haircut or you get fined!‘ So I said: I will make you angry. I went to a photographer and got a new picture with a long hair. I paid an extra for express job, it was a hundred crowns back then, that was nothing, and he caught me again and said: ´Look man, I told you to get a haircut in a week!‘ And I replied: ´Look at this.‘ And showed him my ID and he shut up.”

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    Stop, hands up!

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    “I experienced a single detention. And it was an eleven years old boy, who lost his way from Germany to our fence. I was looking, what that was. I stayed in a guarding tower and cried at him in German: ‚Halt, hände hoch!‘ And we had a kind of phones, so I called the company, which a certain big cheese from Ostrava brigade was just visiting. They came with an alarm and I got two days furlough.”

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    Chomutov, 29.08.2016

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So I told myself: I will make you angry

A historical photo
A historical photo
photo: Archiv pamětníka
photo: Archiv pamětníka
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Jaroslav Pekárek was born on 23rd December, 1945 in Jirkov as the second child of Karel and Jaroslava Pekárek. His parents came from Olovnice near Kralupy and got to Jirkov during post-war colonisation. The father worked as a cooper worker in a brewery and his mother as a sanitary worker in a medical centre in Záluží. The witness graduated at a railway training centre. He served an obligatory military service at the Border patrol in Kryštofovy Hamry. After returning to civic duty he worked in a railway depot for thirteen years. Then he left in Komořany mines. He got married at the age of twenty-nine, but his marriage failed to succeed and they divorced three years later. Jaroslav Pekárek enjoys traveling, visited Cuba, India, Egypt, Australia or the United States. In 2013 he moved to a nursing home Merkur in Chomutov.

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