*I stopped at the hotel, parked the car, and met up with the Austrian. We had dinner together. In the morning, we met by the car, and he handed me a fairly heavy box from his suitcase. Then we drove off. The next day, I was called in by the personnel officer, who asked me what kind of nonsense I had gotten myself into. I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me I had to report to the Liberec police for questioning. When I got there, they led me into some office with just a desk, dimly lit. I sat down, not knowing what was going on. My mind was racing—what was happening? After a while, someone came in and slammed the door shut with all their strength. After the silence, the sound was terrifying. He turned on a lamp in the semi-darkness, the light shining straight into my eyes, and the interrogation began. They started asking about people I knew, and I began to feel uneasy. Luckily, one of them let something slip, and it suddenly clicked—it was about the color samples we had been sending to Switzerland. They were from our production, sent so they could be verified. That’s what brought me here, to the police, and almost into serious trouble.*
I can still see the image of a burning Allied plane crashing into the pond. The pilot survived. I was standing there and saw this strangely dressed man trying to swim to shore. He made it and climbed out onto the bank. There were several of us boys there—we gathered around him. The pilot pulled out a kind of box, and inside it were chewing gums. He sat down on the embankment and offered each of us a piece. We didn’t know what it was, so he had to show us. And then the Germans arrived—and I won’t even talk about that part. It was terrible.
I was raised with the principle that a person should treat another person as a human being, not as an animal. My father was a devout Catholic. And suddenly, from that faith - which taught me to love my neighbor - I was confronted with an image of a man hanging by the neck from a lamppost. Or someone lying in a pool of blood at the edge of the street. I simply couldn’t understand it. I was eleven years old. I don’t know if we ever discussed it with my parents, but I was completely shaken. I didn’t know why - it was a human being. It was incomprehensible to me.
Jiří Sklenička was born on February 27, 1934 into the family of the manager of the state farm in Zderaz near Smiřice. He and his parents moved several times, but he spent most of the Second World War and its end in Prague. As a child he witnessed the Heydrichiad or the post-war showdown with the German civilian population. After his father, Karel Sklenička, was dismissed from the Ministry of Agriculture in 1948, they moved to Kolč near Slaný and later to Litovice. In 1953 Jiří Sklenička finished his studies at the grammar school in Kralupy nad Vltavou and entered the University of Chemical Technology in Pardubice, specializing in textile chemistry. After graduation, he obtained a position at the National Company Bytex in Vratislavice nad Nisou, where he worked for the next 30 years. In 1981 he applied to an Austrian company looking for textile employees for a newly established home textile factory in Algeria and spent more than a year there. After his return, he worked again at Bytex in Bratislava, where he worked, among other things, as an interpreter for colleagues from German-speaking countries. He went abroad again in 1985, when he accepted the offer of the Moroccan embassy in Prague and went to teach textile chemistry at the university in Casablanca. After about a year and a half, however, he took the opportunity to accept a position as technical director at a carpet factory in Tangier. He held this position until 1991, when, in the wake of the Gulf War, the situation in Morocco began to radicalise and the country ceased to be friendly to foreigners. Jiří Sklenička briefly returned to Bytex and then moved to Elitex, where he represented French-speaking countries. He worked there until his retirement. At the time of filming (2024) he lived in Liberec. We were able to record his story thanks to the support of the City of Liberec and the Liberec Region.
