On Saint Wenceslas Day, it will have been 85 years since the largest mass murder of Czechs in the Soviet Union. ‚No one was left. Only the young and the old. They took all the men from the area, and no one ever saw them again. My father, uncle, my mom’s cousin… and I’ve never in my life said, ‚Daddy,“ says 86-year-old Marie Šimková.
Her father, Josef Jandura, was one of the 80 innocent Czechs who were massacred on September 28, 1938, in the Ukrainian (then Soviet) city of Zhytomyr by a commando of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The largest mass execution of Czechs in the Soviet Union remains a relatively unknown chapter in the history of the 20th century, with its details coming to light only in recent years.
Zhytomyr Connection
The village of Česká Krošná was founded by settlers from the Czech lands in the second half of the 19th century. They came here at the invitation of Tsar Alexander II, who sought to develop the backward areas of the then Russian Empire. The Czechs here were primarily engaged in agriculture and, among other things, brought knowledge of hop cultivation to the Tsar’s realm.
In Zhytomyr, two Czech entrepreneurs, Macháček and Jansa, established a brewery that still operates today. In Česká Krošná, they built a church dedicated to Saint Wenceslas. Descendants of the Czechs still live in the region today, although most of them returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II. However, a hundred years ago, Krošná was almost exclusively a Czech village. ‚There were about 750 of us here. We spoke Czech. My ancestors came from Rakovník, they did well here, they became wealthy, and they led a cultural life – they had their own band in the village and even founded a Sokol organization,‘ says Marie Šimková, née Jandurová, in an interview with the Gulag.cz association. She is the daughter of one of the executed, Josef Jandura, who worked as an accountant at the Zhytomyr brewery.
The Great Terror of 1938
At the beginning of 1938, the Great Terror was in full swing – a wave of mass arrests throughout the Soviet Union. Its main instigator, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, ordered the elimination of alleged internal and external enemies. Whether they actually existed was irrelevant; what mattered was spreading fear throughout the country.
In the course of a year and a half, a total of one and a half million people were arrested and sentenced, with at least 724,000 of them ending up with a bullet in the back of the head. Victims included farmers and communist officials, but several special operations were also conducted against specific ethnic minorities, particularly those from European countries such as Germans, Poles, Finns, and Greeks.
A separate campaign against Czechs was planned, but they ended up in the executioner’s circle sooner than expected.
A Copy of the Execution Sentence
Czech Cooperative
Josef Jandura became a victim of the trial of the ‚Czech Cooperative‘ group. Enterprising NKVD investigators fabricated the activities of an alleged Czech military-rebellion espionage organization, placing Jandura at its helm, alongside carpenter Štěpán Toman and financial inspector Václav Holan.
The entire case was described in 2014, based on documents from Ukrainian archives, by historian Mečislav Borák in his book ‚Zatajené popravy‘ (Concealed Executions). According to his findings, all three of the mentioned individuals vehemently denied any involvement in anti-Soviet activities from the outset. Jandura resisted the pressure for about a month, Holan for 53 days, and Toman for a staggering 80 days. Their interrogations were accompanied by brutal beatings and cruel torture, which many others did not survive.
The brutal violence eventually succeeded, and the investigators achieved their goal – they forced the innocent men to sign documents stating that they had organized ‚the assembly of Czech rebel cadres, their preparation for armed rebellion in the event of intervention by Germany, and conducting reconnaissance work on the territory of the USSR in the interest of Czechoslovak intelligence.‘
A randomly chosen group of Czechs were then arrested not only in Zhytomyr but also in the surrounding areas, mainly in Česká Krošná. Looking at the social structure of those arrested, it is clear that representatives of the Czech intelligentsia, who had already fallen victim to political repression in the early 1930s, were largely absent. According to calculations by Ukrainian historians, those accused in the ‚Czech Cooperative‘ trial included 42 collective farmers, 12 workers from various factories, 5 blacksmiths, 3 accountants, 3 carpenters, 2 drivers, one postman, one cobbler, one carpenter, one teacher, and several employees of various institutions. The oldest was 67 years old, the youngest was 28. All 80 of those arrested ended up at the execution site.
The brutality of the Zhytomyr NKVD cell apparently surprised even the usually hardened central authorities, who later sent an inspection team to the scene and even arrested several local Chekists. It was the protocols of their interrogations, which were declassified in the 1990s, that provided historians with crucial information. They also contained reports of what happened in Zhytomyr on Saint Wenceslas Day in 1938.
For example, security personnel stated that when they shot in the courtyard and garages of the regional NKVD office all night, blood flowed under the gates onto the street. That’s why they had to dig a drainage pit in the courtyard. And the trucks that carried the bodies of those shot outside the city, though sealed with rags, still left a bloody trail behind them.
The truth that the 80 arrested Czechs did not end up in Siberian labor camps, as the NKVD told their relatives, but were shot and thrown into a mass grave on the outskirts of the city, was only learned by their loved ones many years later.
Dead, but Otherwise
Information about mass executions in the Soviet Union was strictly concealed until the late 1980s. Prior to that, authorities provided false leads to relatives who continued to search for their missing family members. They provided fictitious dates, places, and causes of death.
For example, Josef Jandura’s wife was told that her husband had died on February 17, 1944. In 1962, she received a brief notice of his rehabilitation. However, she never learned the truth about his execution on Saint Wenceslas Day; this only came to light after her death in the 1990s, thanks to the work of Ukrainian historians.
To this day, it remains unclear whether the decision to collectively murder 80 innocent Czechs on the day of their national patron saint was a matter of coincidence or intention. Nevertheless, the Zhytomyr church dedicated to Saint Wenceslas, now belonging to the local Polish minority, has over time become a symbol of annual commemorations for the slain. ‚Poles and Ukrainians also honor them with us because their ancestors were killed here during the Great Terror,‘ says Ludmila Čiževská, the chairwoman of the Czech Society in Zhytomyr. She adds that local compatriots are quite active today. They have successfully renamed streets to commemorate Czech personalities instead of Soviet times, and they also organize language courses, even though they occasionally have to interrupt them due to air raid alerts.
However, unfortunately, Russian aggression has already left a much more tragic mark on the community. ‚One of us, Olexandr Macháček, lost his life on the front. He became a victim of the same evil that once claimed the lives of our local ancestors,‘ comments Ludmila Čiževská on the death of another innocent member.“
She moved to Czechoslovakia with her mother in 1947 when local authorities encouraged expatriates to help settle the Sudeten Germans who had been displaced. The two women settled in Krupka in the Teplice region, in homes vacated by displaced Germans. Initially, they did not live well there – the knowledge that someone had been involuntarily displaced for them weighed heavily.
‚My father’s colleagues had been telling him for some time to hide or leave because they were arresting foreigners. However, he resisted, saying he had done nothing,‘ recalls Mrs. Marie. Unfortunately, his colleagues‘ concerns soon came true. At the end of April 1938, Josef Jandura was arrested. ‚It was a Sunday. My parents were discussing what to have for lunch, and my father, who enjoyed cooking, decided to buy a chicken at the market. When he returned, two NKVD officers were already waiting for him at our place, telling him to go with them. He suspected it would be bad, so he picked me up, kissed me, said goodbye to my sister and my mother,‘ recalls Marie Šimková, who never saw her father again. At the time of his arrest, Marie was only four months old, but she knows all the details from her mother’s memories.
