Josef Horak

Wynne Horakova, with photo of Josef

(Radio Praha website; photo www.czech-tv.cz)

Josef Horak was a Czechoslovakian Air Force officer.  During World War II he served in the RAF No. 311 Squadron, first as an air gunner and later as a pilot.  311 Squadron was one of the ‘3-series’ squadrons comprised of Czechoslovakian military personnel, many of whom had escaped after the German occupation.  They fought against an enemy that had taken over their country and their skills and experience were desperately needed by the RAF at that point.

Horak and Josef Stribrny, another Czech pilot, were from the village of Lidice and much of his story is told at the Radio Praha website.  In June 1942, as part of the reprisals for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS Officer in charge of the region, Lidice was selected for destruction and was razed completely to the ground.  All its male occupants and some women were shot on site, the remaining women sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and most of its children, other than those deemed suitable for ‘assimilation’, were killed in another camp.  It appears that the village was selected because the Nazis knew that it had two airmen serving in the RAF. They made this act known on the radio and it was communicated to Horak by his best friend, Vaclav Student, another Czech pilot.

Horak, despite this tragic burden, continued his duties and served throughout the war flying Wellington and Liberator aircraft in Bomber and Coastal Commands.  He had met and married an English woman, Wynne.  After World War II they and their children moved to Czechoslovakia, as his squadron was re-established there as part of the Czechoslovakian Air Force. They found Lidice to be no more than a field with a cross and Josef  involved himself in the re-building of the village.

However, with the growth of Czechoslovakia as a communist state there was no place for a military officer with his background and an English wife; he was dismissed.  On 6 April 1948 he took his family to the Prague airport and saw them leave for England.  It was her birthday that day and her present, a gold bracelet, was confiscated at the airport.  Josef then escaped to Austria and finally back to the UK, to rejoin again the RAF.  In Czechoslovakia he was then labeled a deserter and traitor.

The Horak family reunion and happiness were brief.  At the beginning of 1949, Josef Horak crashed into high ground near Chipping Sodbury in bad weather.  On being moved from the crash site he haemorrhaged and died. 

In 1991 a street in the new village at Lidice was named in memory of him.