In front of you lie a few sheets of paper, folded to the size not bigger than your hand. If you look closer, you’ll see that the paper is old and in some places damaged. The handwriting is faded and the paper smells like old books. When you start reading it, you discover that it’s a letter hiding a story which had been forgotten by the witnesses for a long time.
In the letter you can read a story about bravery but also fear. It can tell you about friendship made during the hardest time of life and about hope that one person can give to another. If you were curious and read the letter till the end, you’ll see the autograph on the last page – Stanislav Zeman.
In March 1939 Stanislav Zeman became a member of the resistance organization “Obrana národa“, which was one of the most famous and successful resistance organizations in the Protectorate. His job was obtaining weapons and munitions for the national resistance and distributing it to big Czech towns. He also initiated the creation of a new resistance group in a weapons factory in Strakonice and helped families, whose members were persecuted during the war. He helped them with procuring food and food stamps.
He was arrested in January 1943 in prison Alt – Moabit where he met my great granduncle who was in Czech resistance too. Both of them knew exactly what they did and what sentence they could get. But even in these dark times they saw light in each other. They saw someone who is in the same situation and it gave them the feeling that they are not alone.
Stanislav didn’t know my uncle for a long time but he met him in the hardest time of his life. He wrote a lot about it in a letter: “Tak nám ve vzpomínkách na naše drahé doma a při zpěvu utíkal čas strávený ve Štětíně. Zpěvem a humorným vyprávěním nás všechny obveseloval a každého těšil, jak bylo třeba” (So our time spent in Stettin flew when we sang and remembered our dear home.) They spent a lot of time together but still so little. After the court they didn’t see each other ever again.
After the war Stanislav Zeman appeared in front of our family’s house. Stanislav was devastated when he found out that my uncle hadn’t survived. My uncle had been sentenced to death and executed in Plötzensee in 1943. Stanislav Zeman lost a person who gave him hope in a place full of death. He wrote a letter for my uncle’s father full of emotions, bittersweet memories but also regrets of what happened.
This letter is not only a memory of my uncle, but also memories of what Stanislav did during the war. It’s the most authentic way to document what was really his job in the resistance group “Obrana národa”. But mainly it’s a story about two young people who lived through something that we can hardly imagine.
