“One day I came home, I was about ten, and [Dad] only had the name Semmel written on his letterbox, just his first and last name (no titles), and under it someone had inscribed: That you, Jew? And I hadn’t known anything at all about Judaism until then. We kept to the Christian feasts at home, Christmas, Easter. And so I was completely staggered by it, I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and called: ‘Mum, Mum, we’ve got something terrible on our letterbox!’ Mum went downstairs with me, and only then did she explain what it meant. That it’s not an insult. And I’ve never concealed the fact that I’m a Jew, albeit only half of one. Not that I’ve shouted it out, but it’s true that a lot of people were very surprised when they found that out.”
“Well, and I went to Bartholomew Street [the location of the State Security headquarters - trans.], and forty-something in a brown suit and yellow shirt came to pick me up, and he took me through the entrance and across the courtyard, he unlocked a door that looked like it was to some flat, he opened it for me and said ‘please’, and there was a steep flight of steps in front of me, narrow as would fit one person, and leading to another door. I went in and he locked up behind us, upstairs he unlocked the door and said ‘please’, and then he locked it behind us again. Upstairs there was something of a landing, from which two corridors led in opposite directions, each with a number of doors, and we went to those right at the end. So I was getting a bit stressed out from that, but then when I saw the folder lying on the table, which was labelled with my friend’s name, I was relieved because I finally knew what this was about. And then I just sailed through it all, or at least I didn’t admit otherwise. It was hard, I kind of made use of the situation I had at the time - because shortly before that I had given birth prematurely, and my baby had died a week later. They wanted to know the circumstances of the flat exchange, that we surely must have known about [the emigration] and that we must have paid them for it, and I told them I didn’t know anything about it, that I had enough worries of my own and that my husband had organised everything so that I wouldn’t suffer so much.”
“Well, and I was fifteen at the time [in August 1968]. And then some friends and I printed leaflets and distributed them around Prague, all revolutionary-like, that was nice. What did the leaflets say? I can’t remember any more, it’s an awful long time ago. They contained slogans like that it was an occupation, something of the sort. We printed them on an old Ormic spirit duplicator, it was an ancient machine, nowadays it’d already be in a museum.”
Ivana Königsmarková was born in 1953. She is the daughter of Doctor Věra Semmelová (née Šimáňová), her father Edgar Semmel was of Jewish descent, and he had fought at Dunkirk. After grammar school Ivana studied as a women’s health nurse. She was a witness of events in the vicinity of the Radio House on 21 August 1968; she was interrogated by State Security on the suspicion that she had helped prepare her friends’ emigration. She worked as a midwife at the Prague maternity clinic Apolinář for twenty years, from 1994 she was employed as an assistant at a private OB/GYN practice, in 1998 she co-founded the Active Birth Centre in Bulovka Hospital in Prague. She has assisted with hundreds of home births. She is trying to establish the freedom of expecting mothers to choose if they want to give birth at home.
