Marcela Vaňhová

"My grandfather worked at Jawa, and on May 31, 1942, he didn't come home and was arrested at Jawa. Allegedly for boycotting production. My grandfather was a locksmith, and weapons were manufactured there, so basically – boycotting production. From then on, the SS came to Suchdol and searched the whole house, always arriving at night, of course. They took everything, food, they took everything. They never found anything. They never charged my grandfather. From the documents I found there, it was clear that my grandfather had a radio in the house. They were looking for that radio. They never found it. At the time they arrested him, there were already people coming there to use the transmitter. The whole thing had already been so processed that the radio couldn't stop. Unfortunately, my grandfather was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was the assassination of Heydrich, and they linked him to it , and executed him. On June 30, 1942, they executed him at the Kobylisy shooting range."

"It was very interesting, because all I knew from my grandmother was that my grandfather had been shot. But I never looked into it, it was just clear information for me, I never knew what had happened. And it was only when I was fifty-five, when I was rummaging around in the attic of my house, that I found two medals. One of them was a war cross. It said that the war cross had been awarded to Josef Behenský. So I went to my father and said, 'What does this mean?' I just found it in the attic... And my dad told me at the time that it meant nothing to him, that his father's life was what mattered to him. I said, "Why isn't it displayed anywhere?" Nothing... And he didn't want to talk to me about it at all. It kept bothering me, I thought to myself: that's not possible, if he received the War Cross, he must have been active in some way. So I kept pestering my dad, I kept asking him to tell me something about it. And he brought me a folder of papers and said, 'Here, you can read about it here.' I read what we're going to talk about today. It actually sparked my incredible passion for history and genealogy. I've been doing it for almost five years now, and I've found some incredible things."