Josef Serinek was born on 25 February 1900 in the village of Bolevec (today part of Plzeň, Czech Republic). During World War I, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army but quickly deserted. In 1922, he married and settled down near Podbořany (Louny district, Czechoslovakia), where his family lived. With his childhood sweetheart and later wife Pavlína Janečková (1900–unknown) he had six children between 1923 and 1940: Leopolda (1923–unknown}, Berta (1926–1943), Josef (1932–unknown), Barbora (1934–unknown), Růžena (1937–unknown), and Zdeňka (1940–1943).
Working as a courier among Communists in Germany and Czechoslovakia, Josef Serinek was arrested in 1937. He was imprisoned in Dresden, Nürnberg and Cheb until the end of the 1930s, and then returned to his family. At the beginning of August 1942, Serinek and his whole family were sent to the ‘Zigeunerlager’ Lety near Pisek. Except for himself, all the members of his immediate family died in Lety or Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.
Resistance
Assigned to a work group outside of the camp, Serinek managed to escape with a few other men on 15 September 1942. The group survived with the support of a loose network of family members, acquaintances, and occasionally also sympathetic strangers, but finally broke up. In the spring of 1943, only Serinek and his friend Karel Serynek (1918–1943) were left. On 19 April 1943, Karel Serynek was shot in the woods while trying to escape re-arrest and Serinek had to continue alone. He made his way to the woods of Českomoravská vrchovina (Czech-Moravian Highlands) and established contacts with the regional Czech resistance. At the same time, he started to organise his own group, made up mostly of Soviet prisoners of war and ‘Ostarbeiter’ from Ukraine who had fled either German camps or their assigned workplaces. To support his continually growing group, he also established a network of contacts in the surrounding localities, quickly gaining a very good reputation in the resistance as well as among the locals.
In 1944, the Czech resistance movement tasked him and his group with preparations for partisan actions. In October 1944, Serinek was ordered to lead a reprisal against gendarmes who had shot general Vojtěch Luža (1891–1944), a leading member of the Czech resistance. His group was joined by Soviet paratroopers as well as other members of the Czech resistance. In late 1944, when the Czech resistance and the Soviet partisan organisation had joined forces in the region, his group was divided. The greater part joined the ‘Jermak’ group, while Serinek and the rest of his men joined the partisan unit ‘Dr Miroslav Tyrš’1Dr Miroslav Tyrš (1832–1884), art historian and co-founder of Sokol, a national and patriotic gymnastics movement, protagonist and later hero of the Czech national movement in the 19th century.; Serinek was appointed deputy leader of the unit and as such participated in combat until the end of the war.
After the War
After the war, Serinek settled down anew and married again. His wife, Marie Serinková (1909–1970), born Kudová and widowed Zemanová, had been part of the network since 1943, as had her first husband who died of a serious illness during the summer of 1944. The couple had been friends of Josef Serinek. After her husband’s death, a romantic relationship developed between Marie and Josef Serinek. In 1945, the two took over a pub in the town of Svitavy, which they ran successfully for many years. The pub was called ‘U černého partyzána’ [At the black partisan’s]. Together they raised four children: Marie’s son from her first marriage, and three children of their own who were born after the war. Josef Serinek died in Svitavy on 14 June 1974, four years after his wife.
Witnessing
Josef Serinek was among the first people ever interviewed by a Czech historian and among the first to mention the ‘Zigeunerlager’ in Lety. The interviews Jan Tesař (born 1933) conducted in 1963, though, focused on the history of the partisan movement and remained unpublished for many decades. In 2016, Tesař published an extensively annotated transcript of these interviews. Before that, Serinek had appeared in several other publications on the partisan movement, mostly published in Czechoslovakia, but also in Ukraine. As a result, there are a number of different versions of his history in circulation, some of them seriously distorted by stereotypes.
