"I know they took my father. I wasn't at home when they were arresting him, I came in the afternoon. I remember that there were three gentlemen with whom I had to go to the basement flat, where there was a bag with sixty thousand [crowns]. They knew where to go, my father must have told them during the interrogation. It was a flat where nobody lived anymore, we had coal there, it was a former shelter. It was a lot of money for the time, but again, it wasn't a terrible amount that could disrupt the socialist establishment, that's for sure. I know they also took some gold things that I remember as a small child, my mother's double-sided neck watch, my father's double-sided Swiss watch and some coins with St. Wenceslas on them, I don't know what they were worth. The joy of those gentlemen (one was a doctor of both law Jemelka, an elderly gentleman) was really funny when they discovered that we had a picture of Beneš and Masaryk on the wall in the study. They also discovered my father's Sokol costume. They said that if we worshipped these monsters, what kind of people we could be. That was exactly what they said."
"My mother came back from Terezín on May 12 (1945). I remember waking up and my mother was sitting on my bed. I was seven years old and I still had, it´s embarassing, a bed with a net. I remember that to this day. I know that she and her sister Jana, one of the sisters from the mixed marriages, somehow they had been seeing each other. This Jakub (brother) made it possible for them not to have to be there until the end of the epidemic, that they could escape from the camp. I don't know how, but they got to Štěpánov here in Haná, where the bridge had been broken down. I don't know how the girls got across the river, but a ladder wagon with horses brought them from the Olomouc side of the river."
"I was standing with my father on Wenceslas Square and I still remember that it was a terrible confusion and bustle. Apart from the fact that there were an awful lot of people, I remember two slogans that people were shouting towards the rooftops: 'Who is there on the roof, say hello to Beneš!' And the second was: 'Without Beneš, without Hana, there is no Hradčany' [former president Beneš and his wife Hana, presidential seat is in Hradčany, trans.]. When Olomouc Smrček´s Sokol group were coming to the official grandstand, they turned their heads [away from it], and I know that some of the Sokol members came back from Prague quite late. For example, Laďa Krejčí (his son used to be my classmate and father was the chief of the Hodolany Sokol), they walked in that parade, so I know that the sentences for that were definitely around three months."
Jiří Podivínský was born on 9 May 1938 in Olomouc to parents Josef Podivínský and Dora Podivínská, née Repperová. He came from a mixed marriage, his mother was Jewish. His parents ran a butcher’s shop in Olomouc. In 1944, his father was imprisoned in Postoloprty because he refused to divorce. His mother left in the autumn of 1944 for the Hagibor gathering camp in Prague, and in January 1945 she was transported to Terezín. Both parents returned in the spring of 1945. After the war, Jiří attended Sokol and took part in the XIth Sokol Meeting in Prague. He graduated from the secondary medical school and the Faculty of Medicine of the Palacký University in Olomouc. In 1950, his father’s butcher shop was nationalized, and in 1960 he was convicted for allegedly being a member of a group planning to damage the state’s foreign currency economy. Jiří Podivínský voluntarily left the university, but he returned to school in 1964. In the meantime, he worked as a laboratory technician at the Nuclear Medicine Clinic and got married. He graduated in 1971. From 1974 he worked at the Neurological Clinic in Olomouc. From 1988 to 2008 he was the director of the Specialist Medical Institute Moravský Beroun, since 1992 the senior doctor of the stroke ward, which he had founded. He has two daughters from his first marriage to Pavla Mikulecká. In 2022 he was living in Olomouc.
