Oldrich Wenzl Bures

Oldřich Bureš was born 21st February 1896 in Steinaujezd near Pilsen into a big family - he had 11 brothers and sisters.

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He was a passionate actor and joined a travelling theatre company (Vladykova společnost). During one of his appearances, in Dvůr Králové, he met Anna. The company moved on and he with it. Two years later, as he was temporarily staying in České Budějovice, he was approached by an unknown girl telling him that he had a baby in Dvůr Králové. And that Anna was waiting for him. He returned back to Dvůr Králové to meet Anna and his first son, who was named after him - Oldřich. Not long afterwards, they married and started living together.

They were really struggling. Oldřich didn't earn much as a travelling actor. He realized he couldn't do acting anymore and started trading paintings. His shop was in Prague, in Spálená 3.

In 1939, Adolf Hitler turned Czechoslovakia in a Protektorat of the Nazi Third Reich. When the war broke out, Oldřich joined the resistance movement and was secretly helping to broadcast messages abroad, was hiding a radio antenna from time to time, sometimes even provided a shelter for other members of resistance. His job, a painting dealer, provided an ideal cover story for travelling around and accomplishing the tasks for the resistance movement.

Unfortunately, Gestapo, the Nazi Secret police, got tipped and arrested Oldřich in 1944. After some interrogation, Oldřich was sent on 12.7.1944 to the "Malá pevnost", the gestapo Prison in infamous Theresienstand (Terezín). He was assigned the inmate number 1921 and moved into prison cell 6. Consequently, he was moved to cells 44,37,36,45,36,35 and finally 41.

Still inside the prison, he was portraited on 31.1.1945 by an unknown inmate and this was later smuggled out of the prison to his wife Anna. It is the last visual account of him.

His fate is uncertain. It is likely that he succumbed to the Typhus epidemy that was raging in May 1945 exactly in the cellblocks Oldřich was imprisoned in. A record from infirmary from 2.5.1945 still shows him as alive, but he later did not return home. Oral testimonies say he was transported under Medical Evacuation to the USSR, but it was never confirmed. His death and burial place remain a mystery.