“We knew him, and we thus ran to him. He had a gardening centre. Instead of welcoming us, he scolded us: ‘You idiots, you boys are so stupid, you would have let them shoot you.’ He grabbed the rifles from us. Míla had a long coat and the gardener took it off from him and he wrapped the rifles in it, he dug a hole into the flowerbed with a spade and he buried the rifles into the ground. Well, the Germans got there two hours later. He has saved our lives, because he helped us to get rid of those weapons. Otherwise it would have had real repercussions for us.”
“They caught my brother somewhere, they searched him and I believe that they found cartridges on him. They took him to a yard, made him stand there and they shot him by a submachine gun. A small monument was later built for him there. Pioneers stood guard there on 1st May, and that was it.”
“There was a political official who was in charge of it. He was a pastor from the Czechoslovak Hussite Church or from the Czech Brethren Church. He was a ‘godsend.’ He wanted to do socialist politics, but at the same time he was an idealist. We had to fill out what religion we had. I said that I was a Catholic. He said that if I deregistered from the church, he would then give me a reference letter for the college of forestry. He said that I would get there for sure, because candidates from our school were given a priority there. I told him that I would do it. But when he came to me with the application form, he placed it in front of me and said: ‘Sign it. It is all filled out, you just need to sign it.’ But I said: ‘NO. My parents were Christians and I will remain Christian, too.’ And so I did not sign it. He kept his word and he did not give me the recommendation. I could go to any other school, but not to the college of forestry. And so I decided that if I could not go to the college of forestry, then I would not go to any other school.”
Josef Pešata was born in Prague on 5th December 1927 and his entire life has been interconnected with the Prague-Kobylisy neighbourhood. His father worked as a tram driver and conductor. Josef was a keen Boy Scout and since the establishment of the Kobylisy Salesian centre in 1937 he acted in their theatre and he also played the trumpet in the boy orchestra. It was also here that he met the priest and future bishop Štěpán Trochta for the first time. During the period of martial law in 1942 he saw trucks which were bringing victims to the execution grounds in the Kobylisy shooting range. Josef’s mother Anna Pešatová was pregnant at that time and she died of tuberculosis in the same year. During the Prague Uprising, Josef and his friend wanted to use firearms to defend Kobylisy against the Nazis. Thanks to a quick reaction of a gardener who buried the firearms into a flowerbed they were saved from Nazi persecution. However, Nazis shot to death Josef’s sixteen-year-old brother Jan on 7th May in Bořanovická Street. After February 1948, Josef was not allowed to take entrance exams for the college of forestry because he refused to give up his religion. He worked as a planner in the shipyard in Prague-Libeň. A conflict with a communist chairman eventually caused him to suffer a heart attack. Until early 1990s Josef worked with the youth in a sports club. Josef Pešata died in autumn 2020.
