PhDr. Tomáš Hrbek

"'They invited you here in Olomouc, didn't they, to State Security. These are such incompetent people,' and they started to swear at the Olomouc [State Security]. And they said, 'You know, it's completely different,' and I repeated to them that I didn't want to talk to anyone... And they said, 'Don't take it that way, you read a lot of detective stories. It's not like that! We just want someone... you're popular with the students and we need to know what the atmosphere is like among the students. You can judge it, I trust you.'"

"I knew there were all sorts of materials in there, especially in one drawer that was double. So instead of one drawer, even though it has two handles, it's a deep drawer. So, I knew that the materials were there, I'd seen them sometimes, but the obstacle was there, which I've already talked about - it was all in German, so I didn't really know what was there. And it was only after my mother's death, and also as a result of my visit to London and finding the letter I was talking about, that I started to wonder what was actually there. I scanned the letters, sent them to my sister, who sent them back to me. And it made me all the more interested, and it really was a wonderful time of discovery. The writing was more laborious after that, but that heuristic period, that was, I call it, like going out and looking for mushrooms."

“When the worst happened, the Gestapo from Prague sent somebody here to Olomouc to investigate Bittman and to get those Jewish women, who were still evading them, to Prague. My mom came to Bittman to be hospitalized there, and they came to the hospital. My sister, who was ten years old at that time, just happened to be in the hospital room visiting our mother. When the Gestapo entered the room, she hid behind the bed. Bittman came into the room with them and said: ‘This is Mrs. Hrbková. She is my patient and I will not let her go. If you want to take her, I quit my job.’ And they left. This Mr. Bittman really was an extraordinary person.”

“This pamphlet is actually a disputation. It is titled Das deutsche Theater und die Reinheit des Blutes, meaning The German Theatre and the Pureness of Blood, with the subtitle Die Zeit der großen Charakterprobe, The Time of the Great Test of Character. The German part of the theatre staged a play in 1938, and the theatre’s stage-manager or somebody else wrote a speech for it which was downright racist. My father, who was a husband of a Jewish woman and a democrat, wrote this pamphlet against it and he was disseminating it. People knew about this, and he was therefore one of the first people who were arrested after March 1938.”

“It really dragged on for a long time. Eventually he managed to produce some documents that his mother really had not been of Jewish origin. From the way he did it, it was obvious at the first sight that these documents were forged. Take this, for example, there is a document from the parish office in Kostelec na Hané. You can see that this stamp was made by a rubber stamp from a children’s play kit. And this round stamp here – he once explained to me that he had done it by dipping a cap from an ink bottle in paint and then pressing it against the paper and then he made this part using rubber stamps from a play kit.”