Lubomír Petr

* 1940

  • “And my mother, during that month, when she already knew that Láďa would not return, that it was simply finished, that we were going to move to Přísečnice, which no longer exists today, they built a dam there and it is now under water, the whole Přísečnice. My mother was there to see it before the move, they offered her a place on the national committee and an apartment on the square after a citizen from Sudetenland. But that didn't happen, because when we were supposed to move, my mother was arrested the day before. We went to the Narpa headquarters and found out that mom was not there. So, we asked Mr. Vánoška and he said: 'Yes, boys, the aunt Bláža never came to work.' They called her aunt Bláža. So, Bláža didn't come to work. She won't come again, maybe in a week, maybe in a fortnight, maybe tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, but she definitely won't come home today. So, he called somewhere and two communist youth members came and some kind of police escort arrived. They loaded us into the car.”

  • "We were there in that apartment, we were in the fifth grade, we came home from school and found out that Láďa was not there, that the apartment had been searched and that he had been arrested. As they used to do. He just wasn't there anymore. But we stayed there with my mother, and because at that time it happened that he was already retired, the year before he had retired, so it was actually no longer an officer's apartment, but simply a person's apartment. So he should have moved out of Pilsen, if possible to the borderlands. We had such a household already without him. Mum arranged because we didn't know it would take so long, and he ended up getting the death penalty. A group of people who worked in the resistance during the war got together. They didn't get together, they knew each other, they were friends, comrades, classmates, and they just found it, so they put them together artificially. They made them an anti-state group and they had no idea. Our mother only said, then she told us that when she came back: 'I said to Láďa: Come on, this guy, if he's actually a Western intelligence agent, then I'll eat my slippers, because it's not true, he's set on us at. All of them are.'' In the end, it turned out with absolute certainty that he was placed there, because when there was a trial, he was sitting there among the judges. So he confirmed it to them. That's just how it was done.''

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 25.01.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 02:16:48
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

The communists imprisoned his mother; he grew up with his brother in a children’s home

Lubomír Petr during the recording of his narration for the project Stories of Our Neighbours
Lubomír Petr during the recording of his narration for the project Stories of Our Neighbours
photo: Paměť národa

Lubomír Petr was born on October 22, 1940 in Pilsen. His first name got after his father. He grew up in a children’s home in Pilsen until 1952, because his mother Blažena was arrested in 1950. This happened in December, a month earlier her friend, General Ladislav Svoboda, was arrested and accused of high treason, espionage and preparation of an armed uprising. He received the death penalty; on November 13, 1952 he was executed in the prison in Pankrác. In 1955, the mother was released from prison thanks to the amnesty of the president Zápotocký. Later, the witness and his twin brother Ivan went to a technical school in Mladá Boleslav, where they lived in a boarding school. Only the war separated them. While still in high school, he dedicated himself to singing in a choir, with which he traveled to various singing competitions, and also practiced in Sokol. He worked in the Prague branch of Plastimat. In 2022 he lived in Karlín.