Kamil Lhoták

“My grandparents on mother’s side were practicing Jews of Jewish nationality and they went to the transport. Grandfather, Rudolf Guth, was a businessman. They had a company called Ofner-Guth which sold electric components. The Ofner family all perished in a concentration camp. My granparents left for Terezín on the 7th May of 1942 and on the 9th further on to a German extermination camp Sobibor-Osowa. Since then, there are no records of them. It’s clear that they died there. The date is unknown, obviously. The last information we have is that on the 9th of May in 1942, they were sent to a transport.”

„My mother was exactly in that sort of situation. During the war, she was in her best mental state ever. She was subject to such horrors, such as, she went for a walk with me in a pram and the Hitlerjugend were throwing stones to that pram. It was a horror but she managed it. After the war ended and there was no more stress, she developed a mental illness. Hypochondriac delusions and post-traumatic stress disorder. It was tricky and hard to treat. Mother even spent some time in the internal medicine ward. I used to visit her in various hospital, at Bulovka, at Motol… She was an inpatient under observation for some time but then they released her because they didn’t find any organic illness. Father would go there to visit her and I went with him. Her mental state was deteriorating. It lead to obvious delusions. The delusions… I remember, it was in 1953, I think, she claimed that the brain is leaking out of her head. At that time, she was at the psych ward. First, she was at the neurology ward, then the Bohnice psychiatric hospital. She never improved. So she spent the rest of her life in a nursing home in Brandýs nad Labem. She died when she was 65.“

„Jiří Kolář was a certified cabinet maker. The State Security was instructed to approach favourably members of the working class so he got an offer in the sense of ‘You write poetry but you’re a workman, a cabinet maker. We support the working class and you, as a member of the working class, should work on our side. Think about it.’ And then they let him go. As my dad said: ‘Jirka Kolář came to the Slavia café, paler than death. And he said: How am I to decide?’ What could they tell him? He decided that he’d go for death, needed it be. It was during the Stalin times and perfectly innocent people were executed and Jiří was known to be against the ruling regime. My dad was summoned for interrogations. He was not accused of anything, he was there as a witness. He should testify against Václav Černý and Jiří Kolář. They wanted him to talk about them. He did not have any guidelines. About Černý, he said that he was a crazy professor who cared only about his work and ignored the rest of the world. Dunno, but Černý told Kolář after they had released him that he thanked him. He said it had helped him.“