„I did everything in the lab. Whatever was needed, they´d remember me. When someone was required to serve a flame photometer, someone would always say: ‚Let Fejfar learn it!‘ It could have been anything and I was always meant to learn it. So I was around everything. When someone was necessary to work with the X-ray, they´d go: ‚Send Fejfar do it.‘ I was simply a girl for everything. When something was going wrong, I was sent there.“
„He was almost a member of our family. He spent the whole war in England and Africa. He returned to find out all his family was killed. All of his relatives and acquaintance were dear. He met Zdeněk and told him he´s returning back to England, that there is no one he can relate to here. The Brods were Jews, but also extremely patriotic. Zdeněk told him: ‚But you should pass your experience over here, not in England.‘ So he stayed here and became a member of our family. He was not alone a single Saturday or Sunday, or Christmas or holidays. He was with Honza all the time. So I said: ‚I am unhappy about this. There are two men to care about all the time, that´s is just terrible.‘ And they´d still hang out and talk about cardiac diseases and kidneys. So I said: ‚Boys, if you´re going to say something like that ever again, I will leave you.‘ they´d still keep discussing. We had a reputation in Slovakia: ‚They´re the two madmen, who carry around a huge suitcase full of books.‘“
„Plojhar would never get Zdeňka down. We were still going to his villa. He saved him so many times. Always they wanted to put someone else there, so he said: ‚Gentlemen, there is someone, everyone appreciates, who knows languages. No one else would go there, I will be the minister.´ He was awesome. He was a big guy and I was tiny. We went shopping together. He would really bring something to everyone. He said: ‚Even the charwoman, who brings soup and puts her thumb into it!‘ We would always go shopping; he came and announced: ‚I got no collar! You would not go with me otherwise!‘ He was highly educated. He learnt five languages, he graduated as a doctor of law. When I went to galleries in Rome and Italy with him, he knew so much stuff! When he told me all the details, I looked at stuff quite differently. I was so grateful to him. He would always say: ‚You had enough today, we will come here tomorrow.‘ He was very human. They said he was a drunk. But look, he weighted about hundred and twenty kilos. He´d have to drink a whole barrel to get drunk. They´d only say that about him, but it was not true. We knew each other for so long. In their villa we were at least once a week.“
„At school I had to earn money so I gave lessons or governed the children of rich people. My schoolmates mostly had to work too. I even got to the Kinsky family. I took care of their son Hyacinta, he´s dead today. I met Ludmila many years later in Switzerland. And she was wondering: ‚Oh, Hanulka. How is it possible we meet after so many years?‘ It was not quite a simple life, but I survived. […] In my free time I took children out, for example to Prague. I remember by now, that Hyacint got a five crown coin and kept holding it. We would stand in front of a sweet shop and he´d still think of what to buy. I can tell you these children were kept short. Just some people think they were rotten.“
„So we were all hiding in coil as the German troops came occupying us. We went to the cellar, there were huge piles of coil. We half covered ourselves with it and survived there. There were walking around with guns. I saw how a mum was crossing the road with her child and a soldier just shot the child from the window. And then I was a terrible revenge. Those people waited for him later, then covered him in petroleum and burnt him alive. I will never forget what it is; burning still alive and then dead human body. That was not meant to happen. I know he was a criminal, shooting a child like that, but that was terribly cruel. These things happen in was and sadly will keep happening.“
Marie Fejfarová, née Hančová, was born in 1911 in Boseň in the Bohemian Paradise into teachers´ family. She studied mathematics and natural science at the Faculty of Natural Science in Prague and later also physical education, which she was very keen on practising. As an instructor she attended the state residential camps in Třebon, where she met her future husband Zdeněk Fejfar, who was a student of medicine then. He later became a well-known world cardiologist. They spent the war in a family villa in Hanspaulka, where the gestapo visited them several times due to some activities of her husband´s parents. Later they moved Germans into the villa. In 1947 the doctor Zdeňek Fejfar was requested to come to America to be the head of cardio-vascular department at the OSN. Within duties of his new function he travelled the whole world together with his wife. Later Zdeněk Fejfar wrote a number of nonfiction books; many of them with an author´s participation of Marie Fejfarová. Until 2012 Ms. Fejfarová lived in the family villa in Hanspaulka, then she in a nursing home in Bubeneč. Marie Fejfarová passed away during the spring 2017.
