“Well, we were standing by the window in Ostrovní Street in 1953 and had a horrifying sight because two withered dead bodies were hanging on the balcony across the road. An old lady and an old man. What did teacher Lupínková do? She said: ‘Children, let´s have a look, the fist of the working class has hit the food traffickers.’ If Lupínková was standing here, I would really hit her in the face because of it. To tell this to children. To be pleased by the death of the old poor people. It is horrible. But it is a communist view of reality - a doctrine.”
“Father did not sink into hopelessness. Bolsheviks tormented him in a really nasty way but he whistled to himself. He took a tram from the Praga company and he sang a song: Podle nosa poznáš kosa, podle ptáka Pragováka. (You can tell the blackbird by the nose, you can tell the Praga employee by the bird). He had a modest income but he tried to make life beautiful for us. He succeeded. I can´t say that I´m disgusted when I remember the 1950s. However, I once woke up and eavesdropped on my father carefully instructing mother what to do in case he is imprisoned. Where there is a little money abroad, how to cross borders with me and things like that. I pretended to be asleep. Thanks’ God, that did not happen.”
“My father once found out that I came to him and told him: ‘Dad, I have two dads.’ And he told me: ‘Wait, what is this rubbish?’ I told him that my second dad was called Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. And that he likes me very much, maybe more than he does. Father got scared. He sat me on his knee and it started. Gulags, millions of dead people, famine in Ukraine. Whereas Bolsheviks ignored it, my father knew it. My father never accepted anything more than social democracy and explained me what lies and deceits they were going to tell me at school. And then he told me: ‘And promise me now that you won´t tell anyone, that you won´t play by their rules. Play possum. Because if you ever repeated what I told you, we would get imprisoned and you would go to reformatory.‘“
Martin Rajniš was born on the 16th of May 1944 in Prague. He comes from an educated and well-situated family. His father lost his company after 1948 and had to work as a workman. He had troubles at school in the 1950s because he did not hide his anti-communist opinions. However, his school results were amazing, so after secondary school, he graduated from Architecture at Czech Technical University in 1969. He worked in SIAL atelier in Liberec for the following ten years and he got an opportunity to work his way up to become a recognized architect. Nevertheless, he continued getting into troubles due to his opinions during Socialism. He had an international success thanks to his work on transport pavilion for the 1986 World Exposition. He participated in origin of several architectural firms and became an author of many buildings. He set off the journey around the world in 1996. He got back to architecture after 2000. One of his most famous projects is the building of post office on Sněžka. He was awarded several international prizes, besides other things, prestigious International Prize for Sustainable Architecture.
