Jiří Typlt

* 1929

  • "At that time I had a misery with cadre assessments, [the party] secretariat at the plant. At that time they forced me to go around with them to farmers to convince them that it was necessary [to join a cooperative farm], and so on. I was in a very bad mental state at that time. I even broke down there and finally when they gave me the choice of either factory worker or construction helper, I accepted construction. For a year. That was kind of a temporary job. And before I finished that year near Jáchymov, that was unpleasant."

  • "I was working on the third floor, where the height of the coal seam was eighty or ninety centimetres. That was also rather unusual for a man who had worked freely, in the open air. And that's where I had my accident, too. Because there is, if you know something about it, under the coal there's a kind of a stripe, mixed rocks and coal. And so I was trying to loosen it with the jackhammer, as the foreman had ordered me to do, and the whole seam came down on me, and my left leg got it."

  • "It was at the end of March, when a bomber crashed near Hřídelka near Lázně Bělohrad and the pilots made it through the forests to us near Kumburk. That's the castle there. And one day, that was, we were already on the field, in April, suddenly three people turned up in the house, who spoke to me in English at first. That was out of the question. But one of them spoke perfect German. He was disguised as a forester, with all the frippery. The other two, one was a house painter, and the other one, I've forgotten. I don't know. They found an empty house there by chance, and they stayed there for two and a half months or three months. We... my mother would give them milk. Bread, but it wasn't for them. Bread, they refused it. They wanted buns, or something like that, or rolls."

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    Hradec Králové, 18.11.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:01:54
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
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He brought coffee and milk to downed airmen. They also liked the buns and rolls

Jiří Typlt in the 1950s at the ZPA Nová Paka plant
Jiří Typlt in the 1950s at the ZPA Nová Paka plant
photo: Witness´s archive

Jiří Typlt was born on 28 January 1929 in the village of Zboží near Nová Paka as the first of nine siblings. His parents worked on their own farm, which Jiří, being the eldest, was supposed to take over. At the end of the war, his family took care of hidden foreign airmen for several months. After the war, the witness worked on his father’s farm until starting his military service. During the military service, he was appointed to the Auxiliry Engineering Corps (PTP) in Ostrava-Radvanice, where he was injured while working in a mine shaft. There he also contracted hepatitis and spent part of the military service on treatment. After returning from the army, he joined the ZPA Nová Paka plant. The employer sent him to a temporary construction work for a year. Despite the party organisation initially opposed to him and he was bullied by the management, he continued to work at ZPA Nová Paka until the 1970s, where he finally built up an excellent working reputation. In 1974, after his wedding, he moved to Hradec Králové to live with his wife and worked at Fotochema in Hradec Králové until his retirement. In 2022 he was living in Hradec Králové.