Karel Freund

“I thus went to Litoměřice to do my two-year army service, but at the same time I was still in the application process for university study of special education. Meanwhile I received the invitation for the interview and so I notified them about my situation and asked for another date of the interview and they replied that it would be no problem. I was undergoing the introductory army training at that time and I was not able to leave. In September the university sent me another invitation for the interview, but we had to go for some military exercise at the same time. I have never done anything like that in my life, and our battalion’s commander... (only later I learnt from Vráťa Brabenec that he was a printer from Počernice, an alcoholic, who ran away from his job and got himself drafted in the army in the 1950s. I was telling Vráťa about him and he said: ‘Yeah, Mydlář, I know him, he has three sisters, and so on…’ I was on bad terms with this battalion commander from the very beginning. When they were giving us the ‘welcome’ in the army, he yelled at us (he loved yelling) and he introduced himself ‘My name is major Mydlář’ and two or three of us guys burst into laughter as he said it and we had problems since then. He always liked to say that the kind of guys like us could shit above their heads but their shit would not fall down on our heads or something like that. When we had to go to the exercise to Doupov, I decided that I would pretend to be sick. I went to the army doctor and I pretended that I was in pain as if I had appendicitis. The doctor was quite understanding and so I told him the truth and he let me stay there and when the rest of the soldiers went for the exercise to Doupov, I went to Prague for the interview. The interview was held in Brandýs, and I passed. They notified me in a letter that I had passed, but the commander stole the letter. He was pissed off because he realized that I had cheated him and when I was finishing the army service about a year or year and a half later, he just waved this letter in front of my face. So that’s the way it was.”

“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.”