Roman Fürst

"I then had also another bad experience. In the year of sixty-six the secret police came for me, I was working at Motorpal then, and took me to their office. There some man told me, that they found out that my aunt, who lives in Vienna, works in the Ministry of the Interior. And that they blatantly need me to do some espionage for them over there. That they would let me go there for a week, but that I would have to find out who does what, where they sit, and find out some bits of information. I was so happy that they let me go. I of course didn't find anything out. Only when I returned they came for me again and I was in trouble, because they asked me why I hadn't immediately contacted them? I told them that, unfortunately, my aunt had taken out a whole week of holidays for me. She had to leave her job and so didn't have access to the Ministry of the Interior building for a whole week. She herself didn't know anything, because she just worked as a line typewriter and only wrote on the typewriter, and so she hadn't the slightest clue about anything. The comrades told me, that it was bad, that I hadn't helped them out. They told me: 'Mr Fürst, you will never, not until your dying day, visit beyond the border!'"

"And thanks to a number of coincidences the party chairman at that time, who had gone to the funeral, then later worked as an economist in a co-operative farm in Velký Beranov. I then met up with him years later and he thanked me for never sending out that film. That apparently all of the comrades would have lost their positions, that they had supported that Plock. And so he thanked me that I hid it and that they could live out their days in peace."

“The house we had in Jihlava, and there was the Jewish Synagogue just five meters away, today there is Gustav Mahler´s Park. The synagogue, the Germans lit it, poured it with a canister, lit it at night. Dad was worried about his house, of course, so he called the firefighters, and then they wrote with huge letters on his house "Jewish swine." ... the Germans, right."

“They just came to our clubroom in the House of Culture in Jihlava. And I already knew something like that would happen because the movie wasn't there anymore. We had a closet there, where we had all the materials, the movies and this. And there was a padlock, a latch. So, I thought back then that I could break the latch, and when the State Security came to see it, they wanted the movie. I said somebody stole the movie: 'I had it in my closet. You see a broken latch here.' So, on the basis of that, they immediately came for me the next day to work, and home unexpectedly, they made a house search and took me for questioning. About four guys were questioning me for about ten hours. One over the other, in turns. My friend was in the other room next door. We were there from the morning to the evening. I was tired at the end, and then one of them started yelling that he would knock me out. So, I said, 'You know what? So, I won't talk at all. I want my lawyer and I won't say a word to you anymore."

“I inherited my first camera from my dad, he bought it somewhere during the First Republic, and I started taking pictures. Then I bought Admira - a small camera. Finally, I found out that, there is a circle of amateur filmmakers set up in the House of Culture here in Jihlava, so we registered there with Tomek and another friend and thus started the activity. There they provided a decent camera for that time - a good German AK 16, so it was for 16mm films. This is how we started taking pictures for competitions in various ways. After that I even became a member of the regional jury of the amateur film, so I went to those competitions in the whole country. [...] We had to do so-called Jihlava weeklies for Jihlava here, or actually it was a monthly journal, Jihlava monthly journal. We made a documentary where there had to be some politics, so we were sent to film a pioneer camp where Soviet pioneers just arrived, then something from culture. [...] And it was shown in the Jihlava cinema before films."

“My father bought a house in Jihlava where he had his surgery, where we also lived. There were tenants, shops below, and it was a two-floor large house. But in the fifties, we don't even know for what, suddenly my dad was arrested. He got five years in prison. He worked in Jáchymov in the uranium mines, which was reflected in the fact that after a few years he suffered from leukemia, it was from that radiation. Eventually he died of it. So that´s how our comrades took care of it."

“And since I was doing the amateur movie, we thought we and my friend would go and shoot the funeral at least. So we made the short movie. We put it in the district film competition, where it won the first prize, then it advanced to the regional competition in Uherské Hradiště, there it also got the first prize. And then the regime turned so violently that the nationwide competition, which was supposed to be in Prague, was not held, it was cancelled by comrades. Nevertheless, we met with the Praguers in Prague, where everyone took their own films and there we only projected it to each other. It could not go to the competition, so this way we projected it there. What happened in Prague was terrible. That was what the Prague people had amazing shots of what happened in Prague. I don't think it's published anywhere, either, but who knows where it is, those materials. As people went from one place to another by tanks. They destroyed cars. Such pretty drastic [shots] were there. They set fire there ... there was even the shooting of people. "