Jaroslav Čvančara

“In March 1939, my parents’ rental shop was raided by the Germans with the help of the Gestapo. They moved in for about three days and confiscated most of my parents’ hard work. The films ended up in their archives in Germany and to this day no one has returned an inch of the tape. It happened again after 1948 when the Communists destroyed everything my father had managed to put together after the war. The Communists were even worse because they constantly harassed my parents, interrogating my father all the time and arresting him for a day or two every now and then. My brother was in prison for two years.”

”Growing up in Žižkov meant that one of the most frequent topics of home conversation used to be the time of the war and the time of persecution that followed Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942. Especially since our relatives lived in Biskupcova Street where some of the supporters of the paratroopers had lived during the war. We also had a book called ‘Shadow Behind Heydrich’ written by Andrejs. As I grew older I started to be interested in these things more and more. After reading the book again, many questions emerged. For example, why and how were our three relatives shot during the Heydrich terror. One day I met the author of the book and he warned me that the interest in this subject could be like a drug and that it would never let me go again. Of course he was right. I don’t regret it though. I have met many great people who were arrested or otherwise oppressed during the old regime and I have learnt a lot about their lives. I also got to know several people whom I admired at first but later found them to be dangerous confidents working for the Gestapo or the StB. However, back then I was naive and only had a vague idea about how things worked back then. It all revealed itself to me little by little as I dug deeper and deeper into the matter. I managed to get access to amazing archives, German, British, ours and many others.”