"For me, at first it was an explosion of intoxication, the year 1968, beauty, thinking that everything is going to be just beautiful. And then total, people slowly spat on us, when we started going out with the policemen, Husák had already started. Scary time. That, I think, has spoiled the character of the Czech person most, the whole period since 1969."
"So I was born in Pilsen, which was liberated by the Americans. So it's interesting that when I started going to school and it was already being talked about in 1954, 1955 and it was still a rigid regime, there was no such thing as a wired border. So the teachers at school, because they knew that basically in every family there was an American soldier in Pilsen, just like here. I even still have that parker somewhere, which was a green jacket with the Indian from the soldier of Ivanhoe division, who was there, so I still have that jacket somewhere. It's too small for me, I can't even wear it. My son Honza wore it, he wore it many times, he wanted it badly. So the teachers could not say: 'The Soviet army liberated you.' I had a terrible contradiction in myself, because as I went to the cemetery in 1959, they built a monument to the fallen Soviet heroes. At the same time, not a single one of them died right in Pilsen, because there was none there. The demarcation line, the divided area held by the Western Allies and the Russians, was beyond Rokycany. So it was clear, none got as far as here.'
"They lived peacefully. They didn't get married and the critical year came in 1940, when the Germans still reported that mixed marriages were fine, nothing would happen. It was an even bigger shock when Zdena received an invitation to the transport. Zdena Blažková, born June 27, 1905 in Zámrsko, joined the Pardubice transport on December 2, 1942. Transport number 700."
"Her older sister, that's Zdena, started studying philosophy and had to stop because she fell in love. And she fell in love with a man who was not of Jewish origin, so there was such a problem between the parents. She loved him, they just got married and that was it. She got pregnant, school was over. She came to Zámrsk back from Prague, and she had her first child in 1925, and in 1927 a little girl was born, my mother-in-law Daša, that was in 1927. They lived together for about five years and the marriage ended by divorce. That was already around 1930. A few more years passed and elements of Nazism began to show up and information about what was actually happening in Europe was leaking out. And it was already 1938, 1939, when the ex-husband of this girl wanted to re-marry her, because it was clear that the mixed marriage would not be threatened by the Nazis."
František Heusler was born on December 28, 1947. His wife’s family has Jewish roots. Her grandmother, Zdena Blažková, was deported to Terezín in December 1942 because of her origin. In 1943, she was transported to Auschwitz, where she died, as did her younger sister Anka. In 1968, František was in the army in Liberec with the anti-chemical unit. František met his wife in 1973, and they got married a year later. He had been dedicated to professional photography all his life. He was the author of the book They called him Hurvínek, which he wrote based on the history of his wife’s family. He died on August 31, 2024.
