Jindřich Holas

“In the past, people tended to gather. Now, everyone takes out a mobile phone and sits down and here it goes. And if I sit down in a train and take out my tablet, and start looking up some Latin vocabulary, everybody is staring and wondering that this old retired geezer is playing with some technology. They think that everyone who is old is an idiot. But it is not necessarily true.”

“One of my aunts, Mrs. Topinková and her husband Mr. Topinka... some people informed upon them that they were providing a hiding place for a paratrooper… during the German era… well, they arrested them. They had a girl at that time, my cousin. She was about twelve years old, we were about the same age. They left her here and they took them away and they severed their heads – they were executed by a guillotine.”

“I was in the army arts ensemble – I was only borrowed there. I was not their staff member, I was a guest there. And this K. K. Chvalovský eventually told me that I would go to serve as a guard of honour at a grave. I said: ‘I will not stand by any grave.’ It was a funeral of a Soviet soldier. ‘I will not!’ I told him. ‘I am only a guest in this ensemble, I don’t belong to you, take one of your guys.’ And this caused the hell of a mess for my entire life.”