We hid in the barn until the end of the war
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Jaroslav Poskočil was born in Fryštát in 1930. His father was a civil servant and his mother of Jewish origin a housewife. He had two brothers and the family moved to Kysucké Nové Mesto where his father worked at the financial authority. The family lived happily until the establishment of the Slovak State in 1939. With the advent of the Hlinka guards, the atmosphere in their area changed and they had to leave Slovakia in an atmosphere of openly anti-Czech sentiment. They went to Brno where they lived with their grandmother Morgenstern for a short time. Then they moved to Jemnice where the father got a job at the tax authority. The first anti-Jewish laws caught them in Jemnice: they were forbidden to keep animals or leave the house in the evening, the children were prevented from further education, and their mother had to wear a star of David. The father was pressured at work to divorce her or lose his job. Jaroslav experienced racial discrimination and denunciations but also the help of neighbours who disagreed with the persecution of Jews. His father refused to divorce the mother, saving his relatives from deportation for some time. However, he was dismissed and was deployed by the Protectorate authorities to build a steam pipeline in Austria. Towards the end of the war he was interned in the concentration camp in Bystřice near Benešov. The family survived the Nazi occupation with great existential hardships. Having completed primary school, Jaroslav was not allowed to study in high school or learn a trade. He started working in a starch factory. His mother was frequently summoned to the Gestapo in Jihlava for several days of interrogations because of her brother Armin Morgenstern who was with the Czechoslovak troops in the Soviet Union. At the end of 1944, the Poskočils were summoned to deportation. They chose to ignore the summons and hid. A farmer family in Jemnice took in the children and hid them in their barn until the end of the war. Jaroslav’s mother found a similar hiding place in a neighbouring village. After the liberation of Jemnice by the Red Army, they were all happily reunited, and the father returned too. Jaroslav Poskočil became an electrician after the war, then graduated from a technical high school and the Czech Technical University in Prague. He worked in the construction of power plants until his retirement.