Karel Freund

“I received the draft notice and meanwhile I quit school and began working in a cleaning company in Voršilská Street. I was offered this job by some guy who studied Japanese at the university, and he probably needed to get rid of it, perhaps because he was already finishing his studies or for some other reason. He was a boyfriend or a friend of Jana Černá. It was a great experience – he was showing me how to do the cleaning work. He was sent to do the cleaning somewhere on Wenceslas Square and in Štěpánská Street and I accompanied him and as we were washing the windows in the Alcron Hotel there were some Japanese people who had a problem with the front desk. He heard their conversation and he went there and explained everything in Japanese to them. We then continued with the cleaning of the windows and the Japanese walked out of Alcron after a while and they lined up on the pavement like penguins and they began bowing. There was a station of the StB State Police opposite the hotel and they had cameras installed there. They must have gotten some nice pictures to look at.”

“Do you know what stolpersteins are? Certain German artist invented them a few years ago. Stolpersteins are small brass cubes which are installed in places from which some people came or from where they left for concentration camps. It began in Germany. Here in Prague they started doing it about two or three years ago. The Jewish Community or some organization which cooperates with them handles it. We were in Modřany with Vráťa (my son) and some other people about two years ago and we placed a stolperstein there. What was interesting was that an older lady who was in the garden there came to see it and she asked us what we were doing there. We had rung the bell to tell her about it, but it took her some time before she came and the it was already in progress before she got there. We explained what we were doing and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, my Grandma had lived here and I have heard about it from her.’ She knew something about the family of my father, and by coincidence, her parents had lived in somewhere in Smíchov. (I guess the older members of the family were living there in Modřany), and they had let my father a garden house in Smíchov where they lived. And by coincidence – or rather, not coincidence, but it just happened like that – those people had even lived somewhere in Smíchov, and he was imprisoned for a long time in relation to the assassination of Heidrich, or, perhaps, he even died in prison, but I don’t remember precisely and I don’t want to make things up. The lady promised that she would have her husband contact me later, because he knew a lot more about it, but he eventually didn’t contact me. But it does not matter; I have not visited the place since that time, either.”

“He was an idiot; he taught history and he was the school principal at that time. He was kind of reserved and he did not want to discuss anything with us. Once we heard that our English teacher Věra had displayed a photo of Mao Zedong in her office, which she shared with some other teachers, and in 1966 this could get her right in the shit. They found out about it and what we then did – the six or seven of us classmates – was that we got the idea to obtain photos of Mao and display them on our chests in protest. This principal was absolutely unnerved by it and he started telling us some nonsense because he did not get it at all. The principal’s deputy, who understood it immediately, then came there and told us: ‘You know, boys, take those pictures off, they really don’t go too well with your clothes’ or something like that. He simply told us: ‘Stop doing that.’ And everything was fine. We liked the deputy quite a lot, and we were happy that it turned out that way, and he was happy, too, and everyone was happy. The principal was totally enraged and he behaved like and he was acting crazy and threatening that he would have us expelled from school or what not… Only many years later I learnt from my mom – because this principal’s wife worked with my mom, and she was then telling her colleagues about it during one of their meetings in a café – that she was laughing so hard about it and she remarked: ‘It was so funny, they did it well! My Tonda is such an idiot.’ That was because when they had been expecting a baby some time in the 1950s, her husband Tonda had suggested to her that the baby boy ought to be named Mao. This idiot the principal thus thought that I had learnt about it from my mother, and therefore he was so mad. I realized it only ten years later when my mom told me about it. Incredible.”