"Well, of course, the school, it wasn't convincing. It was authentic there, and we saw the impact the system had. Well, if they're locking up parents, I guess you're not going to be a fan of what they're telling you at school. Even though Mom was ambitious, and we learned all these poems about Stalin and Lenin, I could recite them to a tee. But Dad didn't have any sympathy for that. He shut himself in his room so he wouldn't have to listen to it. But we had a library full of English books. We were learning English, and for him, England was the ideal. We used to go around the dining room table when we were three and sang It's a Long Way to Tipperary with my brother. So, somehow, we were brought up in a certain direction. And to talk about the Russians in any specific way, we didn't talk about them then. We talked about the Communists. For example, I had two classmates, and they took their fathers to the Gulag. Because they were pre-war emigrants, Russian emigrants, and so Směrč came for them or something and took them away. And the children never saw them again. I'm not even going to say their names, but that's how we saw that we were living in a strange world. And we had to be careful not to say what we heard at home and stuff. And also things like parades - we lived on the fifth floor, so they didn't keep an eye on us there, so we didn't have to put flags in the windows on May Day, and my dad never went to any May Day parades. But then that's another story."
"I know many people who tell me now that in 1968, they only discovered what communism was, what Russia was. What do they mean by 'discovered'! We all knew it here! Everybody knew, and those friends from college and in Podolí - there was no support for the communists. It was rather fear of them so that they wouldn't be ratted out again. That was the situation. And in the '68, well, it was certainly worth it. That was a big shock as well. First of all, I experienced how they shot those two boys in Podolí in a van, which coincidentally was driven by a classmate of mine, a desolate drunk. So he took the two boys to help them get to Hodkovičky or wherever they were from, and he didn't stop at the checkpoint by the waterworks. He drove through, and of course, they got shot. I got home a few minutes before, and all I heard was gunshots. I run out on the terrace and see from the top of the waterworks that there's a machine gun, and they're shooting at the car. Hundreds of those men in those floor-length coats with those Kalashnikovs came running out of the waterworks where the crew was staying or wherever, apparently, and ran at the enemy to destroy him. So they shot those guys, and the jerk, who was driving it, was only wounded in the arm, and he ran to the Sokol gym, where he hid, and where the local people who were just in the pub hid him and called the doctor, and he survived. But those two didn't, and even the ambulances that were driving there weren't allowed to stop, and they were shot at."
"We were at a camp organized by a national committee, and it was for children, and we went to the borderlands, to Rudná near Nejdek, where we stayed in a seized pub and went to collect the Colorado potato beetle. That was the content of our summer stay. We did practically nothing else. Every morning, we went to the fields and picked the potato beetle that wasn't there. Maybe somebody found one, but it was an American beetle, and we had to fight it. Our parents came there to see us because we complained that the adults were somehow cheating us, so our parents came there to see us. One day, when we were coming out of the potato beetle collecting, we saw our parents already leaving in a jeep, and they were waving to us like that. Well, because they had these shackles on their hands, and they took them to a State Security office in Karlovy Vary. Because some friend of his [father's], who got caught trying to escape from Czechoslovakia, I guess he was talking about his friends who were roughly of the same mindset. So when they found out that he was somewhere in the borderlands, they went there to get him."
Jiří Gebert was born on 6 June 1942 in Prague. He grew up in a middle-class family. His father, Miroslav Alfréd Gebert, worked in the film industry and was one of the pioneers of Czechoslovak dubbing. In the dramatic last days of the war, the father was captured and became one of the hostages at the school at Zelená liška, where members of the SS murdered several dozen civilians, including women and children. In 1950, the father was arrested for planning an escape attempt from communist Czechoslovakia. During interrogations, he signed a cooperation agreement with State Security, which had unfortunate consequences for him and his family. He was arrested again for breach of confidentiality and repeatedly interrogated at the State Security headquarters in Bartolomějská Street in Prague. He had probably promised to cooperate, believing that would protect his family and prevent his conviction. The persecution by State Security ended when Jiří Gebert’s parents emigrated to Australia in 1968. Jiří Gebert studied architecture at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT), but he did not identify with the style of teaching or with the ideas of the time about the mission of architecture as such. He studied and went into practice at a time when the main work of architects was the massive construction of prefabricated housing estates. His professional fulfillment came from his collaboration with architect Karel Filsak in the design of the Prague InterContinental Hotel. Jiří Gebert is the author of the exterior facade of the hotel. The occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops was shocking to him. Even more so when Soviet soldiers shot two boys, 15-year-old Karel Parišek and one-year-old Karel Němec, right in front of his eyes. Jiří Gebert left for Germany shortly after the August invasion, returned a year later, and briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU). Already in the 1970s, he began working as a freelance architect. Today, he runs his own studio and writes for newspapers, but above all, he is very intensely interested in the urban development of Prague, advocating the preservation of its exceptional historical form and integrity.
