Přemysl Pekárek

“He remembered Josef Čapek the most. My uncle was in the concentration camp the whole six years, whereas Čapek was there from 1942 or 1943, I can’t remember now. My uncle had worked as a clerk and he was good with words, so he got a place in a records office somewhere. I don’t exactly know what he did there, but I reckon he kept the records of the Czech prisoners. And that meant he had access to a typewriter. And then he met his fellow inmate Josef Čapek, who wrote and drew things there. My uncle copied out his poems, and by a twist of fate they got out and reached Josef Čapek’s wife. Some of it was smuggled out during the war, the rest afterwards.”

“I started work as a seventeen-year-old boy, still a kid, cutting tunnels in Trinity. That was my first university. Because there at the tip worked foreign legionaries, English pilots, or, say, the university professor Kocourek from Brno. And I, a seventeen-year-old boy, made plugs with my spit to block up dynamite drill holes with men like that. And a number of years later I worked at the tip with Mr Vladimír Maděra, who was a high-ranking officer in the English air force, and as he told me, he’d participated in the preparations for the assassination of Heydrich in Scotland. The Bolshies had locked him up as a precaution, they released him after several years in prison, and he was my assistant! Another English pilot I worked with was Josef Ščerba. When there was a free moment, they remember all the things they had done and seen. They were very polite, educated, hard-working, experienced people, and I have all the best memories of them.”