In 1938, we chanted with other Sokol members, “We will not give Prague, we’d rather tear it down!”
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Miloslav Jiroš was born on January 28, 1924 in his grandmother’s house in Kvítkovice. His father was a gemstone cutter and his mother a factory worker. Both grandfathers died in the First World War. He went to the municipal school in a one-room schoolhouse in Hrubý Rohozec, from the fifth grade he attended the burgher school in Turnov. In the upper grades of the town school he learned double-entry bookkeeping and typing. He then trained as a locksmith in the company Juta Turnov. As a junior from Malý Rohozec, Ještěd County, he participated in the 10th All-Sokol Meeting in 1938. At that turbulent time, the negotiations for the cession of Czechoslovakia to Germany were underway and the Sokols chanted, “We will not give Prague, we would rather tear it down.” During the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia he was forced to work with other young people born in 1924. As a locksmith, he came to Vlašim, to the originally French company Sellier and Bellot, where he adjusted machines for the production of rifle cartridges. In 1944 he was transferred to the factory in Semily, where he lived through the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After returning to Turnov, he was recruited to the Czechoslovak Railways (ČSD), where he changed a number of positions within a few months. This was followed by a year’s military service in Jičín with the 37th Infantry Motorized Regiment. During the war he met his first wife, but never lived in the same household. She contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized shortly after the birth of their son and died due to lack of penicillin. The son was initially cared for by the witness’s parents. He met his second wife in Malá Skála and together they had a son Josef, and a daughter Věra. He worked all his professional life at the CSD. He went through the era of steam trains, experienced the transition to diesel engines and drove freight and passenger trains. From the age of sixty he suffered from a hereditary disease of high intraocular pressure, as a result of which he went completely blind at the age of eighty. He spent his last years first in the home of his daughter Věra and later, for health reasons, in the Pohoda Retirement Home in Turnov, where he died on May 24, 2024.
