Ivan Renč

"At that time [1943] his drama Císařův mim (The Emperor's Mime) was to be premiered at the National Theatre. This was just at the moment when the Nazis closed the National Theatre and the ensemble of the National Theatre rented the Municipal House in Prague, so before the Nazis finally liquidated it, the National Theatre still performed its repertoire in the Municipal House for a few months. So dad's Emperor's Mime was presented in the Municipal House. And since it was a drama from the time of the persecution of Christians by Emperor Diocletian, it was seen as a parallel to the Nazi persecution of the Czech people and intellectuals at that time. When the theatre was finally disbanded, Dad felt threatened. Many people had already been arrested or at least fired from their jobs. So he quit his job at Lidové noviny and we just moved away from Prague. Suddenly there was such an atmosphere of fear, I felt it even as a small child, though of course only in my childish way."

"That was such a terribly painful thing for dad. There was an amnesty and he was also named when they lined up. He lived, I don't know how many days, for a long time, knowing he was going to be released. So when they were all lined up to leave, they called dad back and he had to stay there for two more years. So his anticipation, his hope, or almost certainty that he would be released... They gave him a hard time. "Back, Renč!"

"It was an ordeal for all of us. Just the journey. We had to change twice, in Bratislava, then in Nitra. The prison itself, it's a seventeenth-century fortress that looked terrible. It stood in a field, and there was this embankment, this road leading to it, and there was this crazy seventeenth-century gate, it was terrifying. When it came to the visit, that was an ordeal too. There were bars and glass and some netting, so we could hardly see each other. I hardly recognized my father. In addition, there was so little light in the interview room that we could hardly see each other at all, it was terrible. I saw my father once every year or two, my mother a little more often. I also remember going there once or twice with my grandmother, with dad's mother. It happened that dad did some kind of misdemeanour. Because he wasn't allowed to write there. And they found him a poem. So he had a punishment, so they sent us home again and we never saw him. I remember one time - yes, it was this visit - it was terribly hot, and they left grandma standing with me in that heat, in that sun, for I don't know how many hours. And then they told us that they wouldn't show dad to us. That was this visit."

"That's what always hurts me a bit, that intellectuals who 'saw through' in 1968 are now being hailed as heroes because they saw through. But people who had their principles in 1948 or 1950, they seem to have been forgotten. Because they acted as characters always, under all conditions, and not only when the situation turned and people 'saw through' in 1968. That seems to me to be a bit unfair to those characters from the 1950s."