Reginald Kefer

* 1936

  • "The government in the 1950s, it was hell in that it was a government of house concierges. In Prague, every block of flats had a concierge, and every concierge was in the party, and if not, at least she was a snitch. For them it was either a side income, but I think they did it partly out of spite. Finally, they were important, they knew something about everybody. They had perfect knowledge on who was going where. That profession does not exist today. It used to be that if somebody came into the house, the door would bang, the peephole would open, and the concierge would see who was coming in. When she opened the door, she knew who was going to which floor, etc. It wasn't just in our building. Some were more aggressive. People were scared of these people, greeting them from afar. It would be hard to get into the grammar school, the reference - the concierge didn't really like our family, so it probably wouldn't be there, but there were different competitions - youth creativity..."

  • "[Mum] studied at a teacher's institute, but after graduation she married Dad. And there's an incredible transformation of a nineteen-year-old girl, admired, adored - she was a friend of Natasha Gollová - belonging to the Smíchov youth or something like that, that she became Dad's co-worker. And the change to such heroism - at the time when she was supporting him, at the time when he was being persuaded to join the Germans - she wasn't persuading him. I don't know, it must have been German... But she gave him a tremendous confidence, a charge to survive and a charge to endure."

  • "Dad wasn't broken, so to break him they put him in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, which were actually stone quarries. It's in a beautiful countryside and the concentration camp was de facto set up so that they would have labour force for the quarries. My father was there for two months and he died."

  • “Look, nowadays people say: ‘The Anti-Charter. We had to sign it or else...’ Bullshit ‘had to’. Look here, they called for us. People took taxis to go sign it. Literally. I remember they called for us – for Jaromír Nohejl, the chief of the philharmonic, and me, the chief of the theatre – to the district committee of the Party, so we’d sign. Jaromír Nohejl was an orator, I stutter. Jaromír Nohejl told them very tactfully that he would gladly sign it after having read it, considered it, and then fine. I nodded in agreement. I didn’t do any more than that, it was all Nohejl. Why should I blather, he said it so magnificently. I couldn’t have said it better. So they let us go and nothing happened. Nothing happened because those few people who didn’t sign were lost in the sea of those rushing to do it. And also, if they’d found out that two people from Olomouc hadn’t signed, it would’ve been trouble for the Communists.”

  • “And my happiest day was 17 November. Look, people started publicly ditching their [Party] membership cards, which I think... I’m a coward, now I’m all hero-like. No, I was just tactful and that was it. The interesting thing is that during those interviews [Party political probes]... They asked me about my attitude... I was proud of one thing, that I never said I agreed with the entry of the [Soviet] forces, and I never said I was content with the religious issue. And yet everyone had to say that. And during those interviews they also asked me about the entry [of Warsaw Pact forces], and so I told them I reckoned it was very cruel. That under certain circumstances I’d invite them through the door, but when they come climbing in through the window, no thank you. And the whole time there was this Mrs Otýpková at the Brno radio station, and she was an awfully refined lady and everyone respected her, even later dissidents. And I was to go sign it there. It didn’t say there that I agreed [with the invasion - trans.], but something like... And I said: ‘But it’s written here differently than what I said.’ And she started yelling at me: ‘Then you can change it!’ And that’s when I was a coward. I signed it. But if it had been anyone else than that respected Mrs Otýpková. And so I didn’t want to quarrel with the graceful old lady. I admit to cowardice. I was a coward there.”

  • “The Gestapo came. They confiscated the huge library. He [my father] called it an office, it was an even greater mess than this here, books all over the place. But he wrote everything in the dining room. But they took all the manuscripts with them. They stored the rest, sealed it, and arrested Dad. They searched the house, but they were mainly after the manuscripts. He was interned in Pankrác and then in that prison on Charles Square, and they always took him for questioning at Petschek Palace, where Mum had to go. I was there with her a few times. The point of the debates was for her to persuade Dad to join the Germans. It was known that Hitler, Himmler, and so on dabbled in the ocult and that it was to be a well-paid position, according to Doctor Patera. That was his colleague from the National Museum. How did he come by it? It was supposedly meant to be in Hitler’s astrological thing... Dad refused. I was there to put pressure that if he didn’t give in, they’d send me to be re-educated in Germany.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Olomouc, 03.06.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 05:18:14
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Olomouc, 27.06.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 01:48:52
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 3

    Olomouc, 02.09.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 03:02:13
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 4

    Olomouc, 05.09.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 02:06:13
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Don’t refuse anything, don’t push your way anywhere

Reginald Kefer in a period photograph
Reginald Kefer in a period photograph
photo: archiv pamětníka

Reginald Kefer was born on 27 July 1936 in Prague. His father, Jan Kefer, became chairman of the Czechoslovak hermetic society Universalia and excelled in astrology and esoteric sciences. Because he refused to cooperate with the Nazis, he was imprisoned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died in 1941. The witness´s mother died six months after her husband when the burden of a difficult period in her life fell upon her. The orphaned Reginald Kefer lived with his grandparents in Smíchov. There he also experienced the Prague Uprising, when at the age of eight he worked as a liaison for the Vlasov army. After the war, he studied organ at the conservatory. He played regularly in many churches and travelled all over the world to perform. In 1956 he entered the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he studied conducting. He soon gained a reputation in this field as well. He became conductor of the opera in Ústí nad Labem, and also travelled to the State Opera in Dresden. With his wife and children he moved to Brno, where he conducted a radio orchestra. In 1968 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and was involved in the Prague Spring. During the normalisation period he was fired from Czechoslovak Radio. He worked as an assistant in the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra to František Jílek, who was a prominent interpreter of Leoš Janáček’s music. In 1977, he left for Olomouc, where he led the opera theatre. He recruited a number of excellent soloists for it. He refused to sign the so-called Anticharter. He went on to perform in the Czech Republic and abroad, taught and received many important awards. In 2020 he was living in Olomouc and still teaching at the elementary art school.