"I was in the Soviet Union during the war, I fought on their side. But I didn't reckon with what would come here."
Jaroslav Grosman was born on the 13th of August 1924 in Roztoky by Jilemnice. In 1944 he was drafted into forced labour at the Daimler-Benz factory in Nová Paka. During work he took part in sabotages, damaging the Nazi war industry. After the sabotages started to be investigated by the Gestapo, Grosman and his friend Horáček fled from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia through Slovakia into Poland, with the aim to join the fighting on the Eastern Front. After crossing the front, they were captured by the Red Army. The Soviet secret service, NKVD, accused them both of espionage and sent them to the Gulag. They managed to escape during the transport, later joining the Czechoslovak army corps. Grosman served in the infantry and he took part in the fighting at Dukla in September 1944. He was wounded in combat. On his return to the battlefront he was assigned to signalling. In 1948 he refused the ideology of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and emigrated. He accepted the offer from the American secret service to become an "agent-walker". While fulfilling a special mission in 1948, where he was supposed to take part in the kidnapping of the former minister of justice Prokop Drtina, Grosman was betrayed by one of his accomplices and arrested by State Security. Grosman was brutally "interrogated" and sentenced to 20 years of prison, and the loss of his property a citizenship rights. He was not released until 1963. He has spent the rest of his life in his native Roztoky by Jilemnice, doing menial labour. State Security kept him under surveillance right until 1989.
