“As I understand – not directly, just from talks – my brother was a convinced communist. Somehow, I realised after the talks that they had helped him while in the camp. There were some groups there… I don’t want to call them ‘resistance’, but there was some sort of resistance certainly. And I gathered from various talks that an organised leftist group, likely communists, saved his life – he was a young guy. That convinced him to become a communist. In turn, my dad was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. And they ‘locked horns’ many time over this.”
“We were returning from Olšany, from the Jewish cemetery, going downhill to Vršovice. It was hot and we stopped in Kodaňská Street; there was a pub called U Miloše on the corner. My parents went to buy me a lemonade. Dad and I stood on the walkway and mum walked into the pub and brought out a lemonade for us to drink. That was common practice. At the time, I had no idea that they had to do it this way – had dad walked into the pub wearing his David’s star, the pubkeeper would kick him out. They were not allowed to let Jews in! But to me, it seemed obvious: mum who was not wearing the star went in and bought the lemonade – and dad and I waited on the walkway and that’s where we had a drink. I only realised all of that much later.”
“I remember my aunt Elsa, the aunt Elsa whose goodbye letters I still keep. She was sitting in our place wearing mum’s colourful bathrobe, it was shortly before her deportation, and she told me: ‘Pete, I will come back to you with aunt Malva and grandma one day. And we will all go to Janovice and we’ll say to Mrs Provazníková: Mrs Provazníková, you better give the garden and the dwarves back to aunt Elsa!’ I do remember this. I may have been four years old at the time.” – “Was that a family house that someone took…?” – “It was a beautiful villa where she had an apartment on the ground floor and a surgery with a waiting room on the first floor. A beautiful, gorgeous villa with a beautiful garden, including garden dwarves too, you see? Mrs Provazníková was the aryaniser, the people who were all too happy to receive a house from Jews who had to move away, who were deported.”
“When I was about twenty-five, I was sitting with my dad – my military service was already over – and I told him: ‘Come, let’s take a trip to Terezín together. You can tell me how it was back then.’ We did not talk about it much. So we got our motorcycle and went to Terezín, he would show me around and say: ‘I lived here in these barracks; then they relocated me from the Hannover Barracks to the Dresden Barracks’ or where – I don’t recall. We also came to the infamous blind track where they boarded transports between the houses. My grandma passed through there as did my two aunts and then my brother I talked about, but when my dad was there the transports would not leave – they would arrive from the east. Germans were withdrawing them from the Polish concentration camps as the Red Army progressed. My dad’s task at the time was unloading those lucky and unlucky ones who came back from the eastern camps. Suddenly, he asked me: ‘Remember Pepík Lévy?’ – ‘I do, I would ride his back in Hagibor.’ Dad said: ‘I pulled dead Pepík Lévy from the car here.’”
“When I was six, that was early February 1945, my dad was on the last or last-but-one transport to Terezín. I was to go with him but my parents agreed to pretend that they were separated, they got some people they knew, and mum and I went to Malešov near Kutná Hora. There, they taught me that my name was Picka – you see, my name was not Pilný, my name was Pick. Many people who survived the holocaust changed their names to get a different identity. So my name was Picka and my dad was working in the Reich. That’s how I was hiding. There is an institution called the Hidden Child, I went to see them once, but that’s another story.”
“My grandma, my two aunts – dad’s sisters and my cousin were deported in forty two. In the evening, I would pray: ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom his love commits me here’ and so forth. And I would end: ‘Our Lord in Heaven, let Grandma Růžena, aunt Malva and aunt Elza and Ota return to us. Amen.’ What more should I say?”
Petr Pilný was born on 17 February 1939 in Prague in a mixed family. His father Adolf Pick, a bank official, came from a Jewish family and his mother Marie (née Kocmanová) was a Christian. During the war his father worked at the Jewish community’s cabinetmaking shop. The Jewish members of the family had to leave for Terezín in 1942 and most of them later perished in extermination camps. The Christian wife protected the father for almost the entire war; he was deported to Terezín on 11 February 1945. His six year-old son Petr was supposed to leave with him but the parents divorced formally and the mother hid Petr under a false name in their friends’ house in Malešov near Kutná Hora where they went on to hide until the end of the war. The father came back from Terezín and became the guardian of his nephew Ota, one of the few relatives who survived concentration camps. The family changed their name from Pick to Pilný in 1946. Petr Pilný graduated from a secondary school and worked as a process specialist. He later graduated from the Faculty of Education and became a teacher. He got married in 1960 and he and wife Jiřina brought up their daughter afflicted by Down syndrome. In the 1970 he was a member of the Local National Committee (local government) in Slivenec without being a member of a political party. Petr Pilný became a widower in 2001 and his only daughter died a year later. Petr Pilný died on 17 March 2024.
