Miroslav Picek

* 1941

  • “Then we got to Prague because our father was... at first [someone ] from Jihlava imprisoned him in Loreta, he spent there about three months. Reicin had him imprisoned because he opposed him concerning... because he wanted the reports on two and half thousand officers and non-commissioned officers within twenty-four hours. Nobody can do it. So my dad told him face to face that only... I will not say more… can give an order like this. And he took revenge on him by having him imprisoned because he did not like it. So there he was. And he spent some time there with the convicts, with the pilots... mainly soldiers of Jewish origin who returned from Eastern and Western front were there. And his observation was that they had said God knows what among themselves, and then because of that, some of them, not all of them, but some of them were judged, so then they were doing forced labours somewhere, and well like that.”

  • “Actually, there were the prisoners who worked on finishing the Štěchovice dam, they were also building a bridge and a road to Prague in Štěchovice. The convicts, their prisoners worked on these construction sites. They basically finished the Štěchovice dam as well as the bridge and the road in Štěchovice. So they were preparing the conditions for the settlement of the area of Neveklov. It was important to them. And then the concentration camp, it's recorded, I don't even have to talk about it, it's there as it is. There is a cross with a crown of thorns in Hradištko. The concentration camps were under... there were some barracks under the bridge in Štěchovice in the direction towards Prague on the right. The barracks stood there for some time and then they razed them to the ground because they were not useful and memorials were not built everywhere where the concentration camps stood back then. Only the memorial is up there, near the cross, in the curve above Hradištko. It is there.”

  • “My dad then actually acted a partisan judge. And it was because when the Germans were passing by, the partisans shot at them from the forest, from Knín. I do not know if they killed someone or not and neither they knew but the Germans came to the village, forced all the people to leave their houses, took young men older then seventeen and put them against the wall as they did it also elsewhere. And one of them who was standing against the wall, told them in German that he would go for those who shot on them and would get them and that they should not shoot. Well, they told him to go and get the offenders. He came there and told them there were men facing the wall there and that they would kill them if they did not come. So they came carrying guns and told them that they were the ones who shot and they only shot them. And the wife of the man who was shot wanted them to shoot the one who came for them to the forest. My father decided that there had already been enough blood and that if they had not wanted to leave the forest, there would have been more dead people and he set him free.”

  • “They went and took saws, those were handsaws back then and there were spruces like this there. The road leading up to Slapy is really nice today; first, it was paved and now it is an asphalt road, but it used to be a dusty unpaved road. So they cut wide spruces and they though that they would stop Germans with them. But some people came from Štěchovice because they got to know about it and they came from below [the village] with hunting rifles, shotguns and so on that they had hidden somewhere and they told them: ‘Guys, cut it to pieces and put them aside. Because we do not want to be killed and we do not want our bridge and dam to be blown up so clean it up.‘ So they cleaned it up and they retreated to Slapy and they built some barricades there, but the headmaster there said: ‘This is not good, this is not good... it is going to be horrible.‘ Well, up there where it used to be called ‘At Moravec‘ and where a gas station and a small memorial are nowadays, so there were a father and his son who were on patrol and were supposed to send a message down to Slapy once the Germans come. However, when the people, who were carrying guns and planning to stop the Germans at the barricades, got to know (also via the phone in the authority) that the German Army was coming with armoured personnel carriers and tanks and so on, they ran to the forest. And they left families with children and elderly people there. Well, and my father´s solution was that he put on a Czechoslovak army uniform of the first lieutenant and went to meet the Germans.

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    Praha, 03.02.2021

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    duration: 58:49
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha 8, 22.02.2021

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    duration: 01:45:43
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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My grandma wrote down the names of the villages that had been moved out to her notebook and expected when our turn would come

Miroslav Picek in period photo
Miroslav Picek in period photo
photo: witness´s archive

Miroslav Picek was born on 28 July 1941 in Benešov near Prague. He was supposed to spend his childhood in his grandparents´ mill in the settlement of Nedvězí but the family was ordered to move out less than a year after his birth. By the order of the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich the surroundings of the town of Neveklov, which included the settlement of Nedvězí, became part of a military training area for SS weapons and at the same time it was the first place where the German Nazis attempted to gradually Germanise the Czech nation. They got an alternative accommodation in a former poultry farm which belonged to a large farm Záhoří in Slapy. Witness´s father František Picek was a teacher and also an officer in the Czechoslovak army and during WWII he participated in actions of a local resistance group. Miroslav Picek remembers many events connected to the war, either by means of his father´s memories or he remembers some events himself. His father was called to serve in the army in 1947 and he was shortly imprisoned in “Domeček” in Hradčany for disobedience of the order at the beginning of the 1950s. During the period of the purges in the army, he was ordered by the then Deputy Minister of Defence Bedřich Reicin to write reports on his subordinates which concerned dozens of officers and non-commissioned officers. He was released probably on the condition of working with the authorities of the Ministry of the Interior which he supposedly refused and voluntarily left the army. His uncle Miroslav Picek, who was labelled as a kulak, was also imprisoned at that time in connection with collectivization of agriculture. Miroslav graduated from Mining Secondary School and in 1959 started to work, initially manually, in the uranium mines in Příbram. He later worked as a technician and he stayed working in the mines until 1974. He later moved to Prague and he worked as a site construction manager until his retirement. He and his wife raised four children, he now lives in Zbraslav.