"Then Mr Kemr came, he didn't come to check the performance, but he came and immediately: 'Mrs Helena, please, I'm not well, call the Boromejky (Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo), I would like to go there for an examination.'' He arranged what time Mr. Kemr would come, and then he handed him over to Associate Professor Chaloupek, and so, very soon, unfortunately it went very quickly, he was already lying there, and now he was running away to the Boromejky (Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo), and to the church, because the church is by the Boromejky under Petřín, more or less stuck to the hospital, and then sometimes, when he needed something, he would run to his house in Nerudovka, because it's next to the street and he knew how to get through the yards and courtyards of those houses to Nerudovka and back again, he could almost walk in his nightgown, because he didn't walk on the street, he walked like this. So then it was arranged with Associate Professor Chaloupka that Associate Professor Chaloupka would alert him and tell him when he thought the time was coming, that it wouldn't be long before he would leave this life, so that happened and Associate Professor Chaloupka himself called and said, 'Come today, come on Friday or Saturday and take the Munzars with you, Mr. Kemr wants to see you.' So there we were, I never experienced before I died, although I tried to do it with my mother and father, I never experienced such a reconciliation and such a settlement and such clarity as with this Mr. Kemr. It was such a tearful parting, actually, not even for tears, it was a parting with thanks and admiration for each other."
"Because my brother had already emigrated, and I had, we had, the whole family had a relationship with each other - and we do - that when my brother was gone, and he had a reason for leaving, because the girl he was dating died here in March of '67. She was swept away up on Borislavka by the cops coming down from the airport and she was crossing the crosswalk - I don't want to blame the cops, but it was just that she was swept away by the cops not honking and she was dead on the spot. Both of her parents still had the experience of being Jewish and they were both in a concentration camp and they only had this Vera. So this brother of mine had a terrible, terrible experience and he had a reason for emigrating, for leaving all this. So it didn't occur to me in the '80s. On the contrary, we promised each other that I would take care of parents here and that I would not leave. I would have left with two children and my parents probably wouldn't have survived, my grandmother was still alive, she died in eighty-four. That was impossible."
"But the forty-eighth year, I had just come back from Comrade Gottwald's Castle, yes, I remember that, and it was talked about a lot, and then 1953 was a very unfortunate year for the family, when they were taking over and closing down private medical practices and my grandfather, although he was actually sixty-six years old by the time he was fifty-three, I remember him crying so much, and that Christmas in fifty-three, when they closed and took away his practice, he was crying by the tree and saying: 'Children, you're not going to get anything from me this year, I can't afford it.' It was terribly sad, but there was nothing to be done, life went on, as they had a family motto, I'll say it familier, of Honza Masaryk, it was called: 'Keep going,' so they always said 'Keep going' and they always added: 'And no whining.' So my grandmother, the painter Marie Fischer-Kvěchová, she actually had published a postcard or a book since the war, after the war, maybe up to the forty-eighth, but I don't think she did anymore. And after the forty-eighth, she couldn't do anything at all, the critics called her a bourgeois painter and she was no longer allowed or able to do anything."
Helena Kratochvílová was born on 23 September 1943 in Černošice near Prague. Her mother Marie Borková, née Fischerová, was a sculptor and ceramist. Her grandmother was the painter and illustrator Marie Fischerová-Kvěchová, a renowned Czech artist before the war. Her grandfather Jan Fischer, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and paediatrician, came from the family of the great industrialist Karel Fischer, who founded one of the first machine brickworks and a company for building factory chimneys in Libčice nad Vltavou. The great-grandmother of the witness Marie Kvěchová was the founder of the Zádruha association in Prague. The association was dedicated to the promotion and sale of folk culture products. Great-grandfather Otmar Kvěch was the first republican financial council. In 1917 his grandparents bought a villa in Černošice, where their only daughter Marie Fischer-Kvěchová and her family moved in 1933. In addition to her mother, she had a daughter, Jelena, married name Látalová, a prominent Czech ethnographer, and a son, Jan, a mechanical engineer. As a descendant of a bourgeois family of the First Republic, Helena Kratochvílová had problems getting an adequate education in primary school. Eventually, with the intercession of her uncle, she managed to get into the Higher School of Economics in Prague. After graduating, in 1962 she was placed as an accountant at the National Theatre. Here, in 1965, she was entrusted by the deputy director Josef Maršálek with the preparation and organisation of the tour of the Drama Department to the Theatre of Nations Festival in London in 1966. She worked in the artistic administration of the National Theatre until her retirement in 2002. She lived through good and difficult times at the theatre, the days after the occupation in August 1968, the funeral of Jan Palach in January 1969, the normalisation, the Antichart and the Velvet Revolution. In 2023 she lived in Černošice.
In the studio of grandmother Marie Fischer-Kvěchová (MFK), grandmother MFK with her grandchildren - Ivan Látal, Helena Kratochvílová, her brother Jan and Jiří Látal, Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1955
In the studio of grandmother Marie Fischer-Kvěchová (MFK), grandmother MFK with her grandchildren - Ivan Látal, Helena Kratochvílová, her brother Jan and Jiří Látal, Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1955
Jan Borek - the brother of the witness came from Sweden for a visit - grandmother MFK, Jan Borek, Helena Kratochvílová and mother Marie Borková, Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1978
Jan Borek - the brother of the witness came from Sweden for a visit - grandmother MFK, Jan Borek, Helena Kratochvílová and mother Marie Borková, Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1978
Jan Borek, brother of the witness, came from Sweden for a visit - Helena Kratochvílová, grandmother of MFK and Jan Borek, dining room of Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1978
Jan Borek, brother of the witness, came from Sweden for a visit - Helena Kratochvílová, grandmother of MFK and Jan Borek, dining room of Villa Sacrabonie, Černošice, 1978
Helena Kratochvílová as a grandmother for the first time - maternity hospital Prague-Podolí, grandmother, daughter Hanka, witness with her newborn grandson Mikuláš, 1995
Helena Kratochvílová as a grandmother for the first time - maternity hospital Prague-Podolí, grandmother, daughter Hanka, witness with her newborn grandson Mikuláš, 1995
Helena Kratochvílová, her mother Marie Borková and Helena Trojanová, a colleague from the administration of the Drama Theatre of the National Theatre, Paris, 1996
Helena Kratochvílová, her mother Marie Borková and Helena Trojanová, a colleague from the administration of the Drama Theatre of the National Theatre, Paris, 1996
