Jiří Svoboda

* 1936

  • “We slept in tents, we were cold and the food was kind of simple, and so was the clothing. I served two years there. But when I was there, I served alongside those who had been there even longer, for four or five years. There were various people there, priests, too, there were students, and legionaries, the younger ones, and so on.”

  • “I was standing on the stairs and dad simply went to him and hit him so hard. Dad had tough hands. He hit him and the man fell down from the stairs of the grammar school building. And he ordered them to shoot dad. They all jumped into the car and they were looking around. One of them who had a submachine gun and a helmet on his head led dad to a wall, on the corner where we could see it. And since dad was my dad, my good daddy, well, I grabbed his hand and we were standing there against the wall together. I did not feel anything, like fear or something like that, I simply did not feel anything. I was only looking at the soldier as he was taking aim with the submachine gun, and I knew that it would be finished for us. But by coincidence the soldier was a Slovak. He looked to the left and to the right and he said: ‘You are lucky!’ and he grabbed the submachine gun and he ran behind those soldiers who were leaving, and we were thus only standing there against the wall but we were not executed. It was a very cruel experience, though.”

  • Full recordings
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    Hradec Králové, 15.05.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 01:05:07
    media recorded in project Memory of Nations on the road
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I was a worker, I did not want to join the Party

Jiří Svoboda, 2014
Jiří Svoboda, 2014
photo: Paměť národa na cestách, Hradec Králové

Jiří Svoboda was born in 1936 and he spent his childhood in Hradec Králové. As a son of a boilerman, he was seeing German soldiers every day in the building which had been taken over by the wehrmacht. On the last day of the war in 1945 he and his father were nearly shot to death when Jiří’s father insulted a German officer. Due to his distant relative who fled to the United States, Jiří was drafted to the army and assigned to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP) when he was eighteen years old. Jiří worked in various manual jobs throughout his life. He is interested in current political situation as well as in the political events related to the Velvet Revolution in 1989.