"He told me, 'I know you have an aunt in America.' I told him I knew that too. Then I signed something for him, a document saying that an interrogation had taken place. And he wanted my cooperation so that I would snitch. I agreed, and he said, 'Please come for a beer to Tábor, to Palcát pub.' I stopped going there since. If I had gone there, probably I would have signed. I'm no hero, and he was friendly. But after I failed to come to that pub, he was tough and I had to pay for some missing tweezers and some knives and stuff like that."
"When he was fired from the fabric store, he had to go into a forced labour camp. It was a kind of Czech concentration camp." - "The grandfather?" - "Yes, that František. My dad managed to have him diagnosed as mentally ill, he could then hide in a psychiatric ward. Then he was discharged." - "You mean he got him a false examination?" - "Yes. And instead of being in the quarry, he was in a psychiatric ward, and then he went home. He hasn't been very busy since. He was in his fifties, so he wouldn't have done much anyway. He was at home with his wife. They'd go to the Besedni House for lunch, and he'd also sit there in the morning with his friends and they'd discuss whether the Bolshevik was going to go away already or not."
Petr Bohanes was born on the 27th of January 1953 in Brno into a family of wealthy businessmen. His family owned a tenement house on Brno’s Freedom Square and a fabric shop. His great-grandfather Rudolf Zöllner bought the house at the beginning of the 20th century and founded the Merchants’ Unity there. Grandfather František Bohanes fought on the Eastern Front during World War I, and during the First Republic, he was involved in the family business. After the communist takeover in 1948, the Bohanes family lost everything. Part of the family - Aunt Zora and Uncle Marian Novotný, a former top manager of Zbrojovka Brno - emigrated to the USA, where they started their own business. Because of this, the Bohanes family was under surveillance by State Security (StB). Petr Bohanes, like all his family members, tried to avoid any cooperation with the regime. Nevertheless, while in the army in 1978, he was contacted by an agent of the military counter-intelligence and invited to cooperate, which he refused. In the 1970s, he graduated in medicine and until 2021 practiced in Nedvědice, where he lived at the time of the interview (2023).
The Bohanes family in the 1960s. From left Miluše Bohanesová, Mojmír Bohanes, Heda Bohanesová, Zora Bohanesová, Mirka Bohanesová, František Bohanes, Petr Bohanes
The Bohanes family in the 1960s. From left Miluše Bohanesová, Mojmír Bohanes, Heda Bohanesová, Zora Bohanesová, Mirka Bohanesová, František Bohanes, Petr Bohanes
