Josef Serinek

Josef Serinek was born in 1900. He did not know his parents who died before his second birthday; he was brought up by his sister [Vincencie] Janečková. Before World War I he worked on a farm in Liblin, where he also went to school. At the age of 15, he joined a group of deserters from the army, which included his brother [Eda]; they lived in dugouts in the Šumava forests until the gendarmes arrested them in May 1916. Serinek was conscripted and was taken to the Hungarian town of Nagykanisz, where he received rifle training. Due to a reaction to vaccination, he did not go to the Italian front and was hospitalized. During his convalescence he was given leave of absence in Bohemia, during which he deserted, and from the end of August 1916 he was again moving around the Šumava with the Green Cadres.

The large group of deserters was armed and they tried to survive in the forests of Šumava and Buchlov in the vicinity of Horšovský Týn and Přeštice. During one shootout with gendarmes, Serinek was shot in the thigh and arrested. He and the whole group were tried by the Regional Court in Pilsen not only for defection, but also for robbing a jewellery shop in Přeštice and shooting at a gendarme. He was sentenced to three years in prison. In Pankrác Prison, he attended school and learned to sew military uniforms, among other things. He had to have a further operation on his leg. When the war ended, he was released in November 1918 and sent to the Komenský State Social Welfare Institute for Abandoned Youth in Košice.

Serinek trained as a gardener at the institute and planned to settle in Košice, but eventually joined his family in Podbořany in north-west Bohemia at the beginning of 1921. Here he met his future wife [Pavlina Janečková] and in 1923 their first daughter [Leopolda] was born. He and his wife made a living by peddling haberdashery, which Serinek also smuggled to Germany. He also carried mail across the border between German and Czech Communists and helped them find new contacts and people interested in joining the Communist Party. With the rise of Hitler in Germany, the smuggling routes became much more dangerous. At one crossing he shot a border guard and wounded a female border guard — an alleged Heinlein supporter. Then, in 1938, while crossing the border, he was arrested by a German gendarme and charged with recruiting for the Communist Party, among other things, and was taken into custody in Dresden.

In November 1938, Serinek was transferred to Nuremberg Prison and tried for illegal border crossing and anti-state activities. His defence was undertaken by a lawyer called Fenderle from Cheb, who managed to get Serinek released from custody after 31 months due to lack of evidence. In October 1938, after the occupation of the Sudetenland, Serinek’s wife and their five children were taken from the farm in Brody in the Sudetenland, where they lived and worked, to Slabec near Rakovník in the Czech interior.

After his release from prison, Serinek worked in several jobs before he was hired as a carter on the Rohy farm in the village of Bohy at the end of 1941. Here he even became involved in the trade union[1] and advocated fair pay for all employees. At the end of June 1942, Serinek and his family were subjected to anthropometric measurements by gendarmes from Liblín and on 2 August 1942 they were taken to the camp at Lety near Písek. They were allowed to pack only twenty kilograms of luggage each; the gendarmes sold off the household furnishings to people from the village and gave the money to Serinek’s wife. They were transported on a hay wagon to Liblin and from there by lorry to Plzeň-Doudlevice, where they were taken together with the other detainees on a long goods train to Čimelice and finally again by lorries to Lety near Písek. In the camp, the men were housed separately, twenty of them in 6 x 3 metre quarters. At first, women and children were housed together; later, women were only allowed to have infants with them, while older children were housed in their own separate quarters. The guards in the camp were Czech gendarmes, the Germans came only for inspections. The new arrivals had to hand in everything, wash themselves and be shaved. Serinek spent six weeks in the camp, and recalled that during that time he witnessed seventeen people being beaten. One of the victims was a girl of about sixteen who got lost while working in the woods. The gendarmes found her and, as a deterrent, hung her on a cross in the camp and beat her. She was then placed in in solitary confinement but was never seen again.

Serinek was assigned to work in a quarry, breaking rocks to build a road, and he constantly thought about the possibility of escape. He was pleased when he was selected for logging fallen trees at Nevezice, which was further away. He managed to escape from there a month later in the early evening of 15 September 1942, together with four other prisoners.[2]

The greatest danger posed to them while escaping were the gamekeepers, because they were armed and on familiar territory. The fugitives avoided people and moved along the beds of streams to avoid leaving scent trails for dogs. After a few days, they split up and Serinek continued on with Jarek and Wilhelm. They moved around the northwest and west of Bohemia, trying to find relatives and arrange channels of communication with the family at the camp in Lety. On one of their journeys from Rokycany to Praskoles they encountered a German soldier whom they killed in self-defence, thereby obtaining a weapon. As a consequence of that incident, search operations were initiated in the forests, and the group set off in the direction of Yugoslavia via Moravský Krumlov. However, they did not risk crossing into Austria without more equipment and preparation, so they returned to Bohemia. In western Bohemia they managed to rob a chalet belonging to Count Mansfeld, where they acquired better clothing and weapons. They obtained gunpowder and fuses from an acquaintance of Jarek’s who worked at a quarry near Hořovice, their intention being to blow up a bridge. Later, when Serinek wanted to demonstrate blasting to his friends, the charge exploded and caused burns to his chest and face. They took refuge in the manorial forest at Čechtice, where a miller they knew procured ointment for his burns from a local doctor in exchange for a gun, and Serinek spent some time recovering there.

Wilhelm also sustained injuries when he accidentally shot himself in the foot with his rifle and Serinek had to amputate his injured toe while Wilhelm was fully conscious. Not long afterwards, Serinek and Jarek were caught by two gendarmes while foraging for food near the village of Žižkovo Pole. They managed to overpower the gendarmes and shoot them, but they lost all their belongings and never found Wilhelm again. The two of them made their way with difficulty through the winter countryside; before Easter 1943 they were surrounded by gendarmes in the area of the South Bohemian ponds. Jarek was killed[3] and Serinek was shot. The loss of his friend was a heavy blow. He headed from South Bohemia to Brno and wanted to continue on to Slovakia, but could not get across the border.

In late spring, Serinek shifted to the Žďár Hills, where he began to encounter more compassionate people from local Protestant families who provided him with food, clothing and much-needed human contact. Serinek started to look to for a resistance network to join. He found refuge, for example, with the family of František Matěj, a peasant from Kutina. He made contact with a Russian deserter known as ​“Big-nosed Michal” and for the first time met important figures of the resistance such as Josef Svatoň, Eduard Soška, František Hyška and General Luža. By the end of the summer, Serinek was associating with three young escaped Russian prisoners, building a network of contacts and support families in the villages between Polička and Bystřice nad Pernštejnem.

The group around Serinek gradually grew to dozens of men. Josef Ondra, a blacksmith from Krásný who supported the resistance, sent fugitive Russian prisoners to Serink, as also did Franta Barták from Dalečín. They survived the winter by staying in groups with families, because in the forest they would have left footprints in the snow. Serinek particularly remembered Věcov, where they stayed until March, distilling their own spirits and playing cards, and the local peasants used to come to them ​“as if going to a pub”. In the spring of 1944 they retreated back to the forests around Daňkovice and Veselí. Serinek and his group built dugouts and tried to procure weapons and food.

Serinek then described the final preparations for active resistance in the summer of 1944, when the first casualties occurred. František Hyška, alias Novotný, was shot and arrested. In September, Nikolai Bakhmutsky joined the Daňkovice forest detachment[4] as military commander. At Hřistě near Přibyslav, the gendarmes shot the commander-in-chief Luža and his adjutant Svatoň, after which Serinek was ordered to make a punitive raid on the gendarmerie station in Přibyslav. They captured it and shot the gendarmes present. He was accompanied on the expedition by Luža junior, among others. Events began to gather momentum at the end of autumn, and the first Soviet paratroopers joined the forest detachment.[5]

In addition to Serinek’s and Bakhmutsky’s detachment, the Soviet Yermak airborne units and the Dr. Miroslav Tyrš detachment operated in Blansko. In December 1944, during a meeting with the Yermak headquarters staff in Žďárná, there was a shootout with the Gestapo, during which Bakhmutsky was killed. Serinek’s forest group subsequently split, with the Soviet members joining Yermak, while the others, including Serinek, joined the Dr. Miroslav Tyrš detachment. At that time, the group was joined by Marie Zemanová, who married Serinek after the war.

Serinek was put in charge of supplies for the Dr. Miroslav Tyrš detachment under the command of [Ivan Andreyevich] Labunsky; the detachment operated in the areas of Nové Město and Bystřice. At the very end of the war, on May 7, 1945, Serinek helped to disarm the military infirmary in the municipal school in Bystřice nad Pernštejnem, where he saved wounded German soldiers from execution. He even left the officers their pistols and wanted to let them retreat, but other SS units arrived and in the exchange of fire, two of Serinek’s comrades (František Kupsa and Janko Silný) were killed. After the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945, the German army began to withdraw from Bystřice nad Pernštejnem and in the early hours of 9 May, Soviet troops entered the town.

[1] The National Employees’ Trade Union Headquarters; Serinek contacted its regional secretariat in Plzeň even after his internment in the summer camp; an eloquent reply to his letter has survived: ​‘We acknowledge receipt of your letter and inform you that we cannot grant your request this time, since we believe that the authority which assigned you to the disciplinary camp must have had serious reasons for doing so. […]’ See facsimile, Volume I, p. 63.

[2] Serinek repeatedly stated that five prisoners escaped, but both Tesař and the historian Ctibor Nečas managed to trace in the archival materials only three prisoners who, according to the camp records, escaped on the same day: Josef Malík, Vilém/Wilhelm Vrba and the Jarek mentioned by Serinek; the latter was identified by Tesař as Karel Serynek.

[3] 19 April 1943 near Ratiboř in the Jindřichův Hradec region. (ed.)

[4] After the war it was called the Chapayev detachment, based on a dossier written about the detachment by the resistance fighter Zástěra. (ed.)

[5] This was part of the Dr. Miroslav Tyrš detachment that was airdropped on the evening of 25 October 1944 near Pelhřimov. (ed.)