Vladimír Linhart

“We were going home and I wanted to take Nadja with me. But this time we were going via Hagenwerder and not Zittau, because we thought that there were Poles and Germans, and they would not stop us... But it was the Poles, not Germans, who separated us in Hagenwerder. I still have it written on one of the pictures, that they had returned to their accommodation, you will see it written there. I made several attempts after that – my brother-in-law was going to Russia as a researcher from the Construction Materials Research Institute in Brno and he was trying to find her. Then I had a friend who worked there as a company representative for Škoda, but he was not successful, either; we simply have not found her. We even learnt that in that village, in Dubrovka, none of the original residents remained.”

(When he met Jan Masaryk in the Olšany cemetery after WWII). “Only after the war, when he [Tomáš G. Masaryk] was elected president, she learnt that the boy who had been pulling her plaits was actually the son of the president. And he remembered that. He thus told me: ´My friend, in this case I grant you the right to use the name of my father as the name of your godfather.´ And so this way I happened to have President Masaryk as my godfather.”

(During forced labour in Germany, when he and his friends met Hitler in a pub). “Somebody there exclaimed: ´A Czech cake – a good cake, and spasiba!´ They noticed that the girls had the letter U [standing for Ukraine] and that they were serving there as waitresses. They gave our construction manager a ride home, because they were going through Hirschfelde, and they thus let him go with them so that he would not have to return with us. I asked the manager the following day who was the person who had said those words of appreciation and thanks, and he claimed that it was Hitler himself.”

(When Vladimír Linhart complained to colleagues in the ČKD factory that he would need a strong light bulb for construction, which was normally not in stores, but which they had in the factory.) “What happened was that a friend, a guy who was younger than me, tells me: ´Boss, that’s no problem. I will bring it to you.´ I asked him: ´But how could you do it?´ They were doing random checks in the gatehouse and one could get into trouble, and I didn’t want this to happen, I hated stealing. But he did this: he took the light bulb, he tied a cord around it and he tied the other end around his neck. The bulb was bouncing on his back, and as he was passing through the gatehouse, the gatekeepers were making fun of him and laughing – they thought that the light bulb was broken, not stolen. And so I got hold of it, it was a theft, but not my own.”