Jarda had told me not to go because the battle of Prague was still on. But he stayed and died of typhus.
Download image
Vojtěch Šimek was born on 22 April 1924 in Bludov near Šumperk. He attended elementary and secondary school, and used to exercise in the Sokol movement. Right after finishing school he was forced to take up a job at a farm near the Bludov chateau, which was under German administration. In 1943 he and his friends Weiser, Jaroslav Špička and Jaroslav Plhák decided to leave for Slovakia and join the partisans. Initially, they planned to acquire weapons from the miller Hubert Habermann. Vojtěch broke into his house at night but failed to find the weapons. The second attempt was successful - Vojtěch stole a hunting rifle from Korkyša, the German manager of the farm. They exchanged the rifle for a revolver and set out in the autumn of 1943, successfully getting to Bílá. Their efforts to contact the partisans were terminated after some three weeks by German soldiers who encircled the forest and sent the dogs in. The boys were arrested and imprisoned in Krnov where Vojtěch witnessed the prison being hit by a bomb. He and his fellow prisoners had to clean up the impacts of the explosion. He went through prisons in Opava, Brno and through brutal interrogations at the Šumperk Gestapo. All four boys were convicted and taken to the Small Fortress of Terezín. Vojtěch was interned at the fourth yard. Every day he would go with the other prisoners to work in Litoměřice, building an underground factory. He was a typical Aryan and therefore always had a certain advantage. He did not have to work at the factory, merely bringing water to the others. By the end of the war, he fell ill with typhus. After the liberation, the Russian medics transferred hem to the former ghetto. He immediately signed up for a transport to Poděbrady from where he got to Zábřeh and eventually back home.
