“I would say to preserve what is still there. Not to destroy it. That takes a lot of effort. You understand me, we leave the castles fall into disrepair and they become ruins. Nature is being destroyed. That is a problem. It should be preserved. In a smart way, not just cover it with some mortar. This would be my message. (…) My message for other people; and a message for me would be to never grow old. That would be wonderful.”
“When I was in Pilsen, the Reds, those with red bands (Revolutionary Guards), approached me. They told me: ‘Come, we got the Gestapo man of yours who tortured you. Go and smash his face.’ I told them: ‘Comrades, go beat him instead of me, I’m fed up with this. Do whatever you want.’ They thus made him carry bricks from one pile to another and back, a Sisyphus’s work.”
“There were various organized tours, and I got to Istanbul and there I broke through a cordon of policemen and I applied for asylum and I got a Turkish passport. I arrived to America with a Turkish passport. I was in a Turkish pre-trial detention and when Americans learnt about it, they came to pick me up. I was then in home confinement together with one Turkish man.”
“I was in Mariánské Lázně. People began escaping over the border even before the coup d’état in February 1948. I don’t know if they were escaping before the February, during the events, or after that. I established contact with a certain English club. (...) We were helping people get over the state border. I tried it once, too, but they caught me, obviously. I denied everything and they said: ‘If you hear about something by coincidence, tell us.’ I said: ‘Yes, comrades, I do know what my duty is.’ If you knew how to deal with the communists, you could trick them quite easily. I never supported false bravery.”
“They wanted me to undergo a lie detector test. Well, you Americans, if you don’t trust me... Why should they trust me, when the circumstances of my escape were so strange - at first I went to the Soviet Union and then to France from which I came back. That was strange in itself. I thus undertook the lie detector test and things then happened very quickly. Suddenly I was working again.”
MUDr. Vladimír Richard Piskáček was born in 1929 in Pilsen as the only son of his elderly parents. He grew up in Mariánské Lázně. His father was a lawyer who died before the outbreak of WWII, and his mother ran a bookshop. Vladimír describes himself as an intelligent child who had troubles with learning and who felt as an outsider since a very young age. In 1944 when he was fifteen years old he was interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo due to some anti-German signs he made. In 1948 he made an unsuccessful attempt to emigrate. A year later he graduated from secondary school and he began studying medical faculty, from which he graduated in 1956, specializing in psychiatry. In 1958 he emigrated to the United States of America via Turkey. In the USA he studied medicine again and he opened a psychiatric practice in Long Island in New York State. Vladimír spent more than forty years abroad. From his home in New York he often travelled all over the world and as an amateur he was interested in ethnology, cultural and social anthropology and spiritual practices of ‘primitive’ tribes. In his free time he enjoys painting and photography. From the 1990s he began going back to the Czech Republic. He donated part of his ethnographic collection to Czech museums - to the Náprstek Museum in Prague and the Museum of West Bohemia in Pilsen. At present he lives in Rychnov nad Kněžnou with his wife who is considerably younger than him.
