I was born on May 11, 1943, in Prague Vinohrady. My parents were renting a nice apartment at Jana Masaryka 14, which had a large, well-kept private backyard that was not common in Prague. My sister Jana was already 2 years old. My father was 48 and my mother was 37; they had married in 1939.
Before the German occupation, and in the early years of it, my father held a high position in the Ministry of Finance. My mother had a well-established business called Modni Salon Linie on Nekazanka Street in Prague, where she designed and made one-of-a-kind clothing for wealthy ladies. My father also had an art gallery in the same building as her salon.
What I know about that period I learned later, partly from my parents and partly from research I did in recent years, since I was far too young to remember any of it myself. From the very start of the German occupation, my father was heavily involved in the resistance. He was second in command of a group called Avala, where he used the code name Merta, and the group spied on the Germans in the Czech and Moravian Protectorate and transmitted intelligence to the Czech government in exile in London. He was also secretly using government funds to finance the Czech underground.
Sometime in 1938 or 1939, my father had built a secret cabin in the forests around Bohdalov in Ceskomoravska Vysocina. From the outside it looked like a hay storage structure for deer, but inside it was fully furnished. He used it as a place to hide people who were being hunted — partisans, and paratroopers both from the West and from Russia. His uncle, Emanuel Pliczka, owned a mill in Bohdalov, and my father used that whole area as a base for his operations.
Shortly after my birth, when the situation in Prague became too risky, my father left his position at the Ministry of Finance and moved us to Bohdalov, to his uncle’s mill. My mother had to close the salon.
My father was also involved in helping to establish a larger resistance movement called Rada 3, headed by General Vojtěch Luža. The founding meeting of Rada 3 took place on July 17, 1944, at my father’s cabin near Bohdalov, and my father was formally named as the deputy of Josef Cisař, who led the Avala group within the organization.
On October 2, 1944, General Luža was killed near Přibyslav while traveling back toward Bohdalov, after a wave of Gestapo arrests in Prague. General Luža’s son, Radomír, was in hiding in Bohdalov at the time, and it was my father who told him of his father’s death, having learned of it from the local gendarmes. Soon after General Luža’s death, since the Gestapo still had not managed to find my father, they issued an order to the local gendarmes that if they came across my father they were to shoot him immediately, and if they came across my mother they were to arrest her and take her to the Gestapo office in Jihlava. My father managed to escape in time and went completely underground, organizing a small partisan group of his own, which operated under the code name Slávek.
My mother was arrested in November 1944, and was held for some time before she was eventually released, thanks to the intervention of Count Podstatzky — the same person my father asked me to look up in the West when I spoke with him in the hospital in 1965, since he believed Podstatzky would help me if I needed it. Immediately after her release, we went into hiding and joined my father somewhere near Hermanov, where we lived in an underground bunker until the end of the war.
Recently I received a written account from my second cousin’s brother-in-law, Frantisek Molinari, about the resistance activity in Bohdalov during the war. He wrote it in 1995, based partly on archives and partly on what he had heard directly from people who were involved, including his own father, who was one of the men who guided my father through hiding. According to him, the bunker we lived in was on a property near Hermanov called Vratislávka, which belonged to a merchant named Ludvík Burian, and it was dug out between January and March of 1945, starting from an existing cellar. He wrote that there were actually 2 bunkers built there, equipped with bunks, a well, a stove, and even an emergency exit, and that together they could hide up to 25 people.
I had always believed that the bunker was somewhere in the Bohdalov forest, near my father’s cabin, since that is what I had always been told. In 2005, my second cousin Jan Pliczka, who was about my age and from the mill, showed me and my children a hole in the forest that he claimed was a remnant of the bunker. My sister Jana, on the other hand, always believed it was located somewhere else. Molinari’s account, which places the bunker near Hermanov at Vratislávka, is new information to me, but I believe it to be accurate. I am still trying to determine exactly where it was located.
My mother’s sister, Aunt Pisty (Josefina Bartosova), and her husband were hiding with us in the bunker as well, since the whole family needed to stay together. My parents told me a story a few times over the years, about how, just before the end of the war, Aunt Pisty took me out of the bunker onto a nearby meadow to get some sun, since I was yellow from jaundice. At the same time there happened to be shooting going on between my father’s partisans and some German soldiers who were trying to escape. My father was furious at my aunt for doing this without asking anyone, since she had put me in danger without permission.
They also told me that while we were still at my father’s uncle’s mill in Bohdalov, before we went into hiding, that my father was actually my uncle, Josef (Pepi) Bartos, so that if I happened to run into my real father somewhere, I would not react to him the way a child reacts to his own father and give something away. My mother also often used the baby carriage I was in to bring food to my father and the other partisans hiding in the area around his cabin, since no one would suspect a mother pushing a baby carriage with food in it.
There is a second story from that time, which I only know because Dr. Rastislav (Rasta) Vahala told it himself, a few times, when he used to visit us later in Prague, after I was old enough to remember it. Dr. Vahala was the courier between Josef Cisar in Prague and my father in Bohdalov. The first time he came to my father’s cabin, he could not remember the password that was supposed to prove he was legitimate. My father kept a hunting gun pointed at him the whole time, since he suspected Dr. Vahala could be a Gestapo plant sent to find him. It took a while, but in the end Dr. Vahala remembered the password. Years later, the two of them used to laugh about it, about how close my father came to shooting him.
Of all of this, I have almost no direct memory, since I was not yet 1 year old when we left Prague and not yet 2 when the war ended. Everything I know about those years comes from my parents and from my own recent research.
I have only 2 images from that time that I can call genuine memories. One is a clear picture of being on a ladder, with someone pushing me from below and someone pulling me from above. I do not know where we were or why. The other is a picture of standing with my mother and my sister on the side of a road in some village — maybe Bohdalov — watching a column of German prisoners being marched past. My sister and I both had runny noses, and one of the German prisoners, as he walked by, showed us how to deal with it by wiping his own nose with his fingers and flicking it to the ground. It is not a flattering detail, but it is one of the only genuine memories I have from those years, and for that reason I include it.