“I was happy during the Prague Spring and I was even gathering signatures for the support of K231 and I was telling quite a lot to the vocational school students in my school. Couple of days after the entry of the Soviet occupying army to Czechoslovakia, my apprentices called me to immediately go away somewhere with my entire family. There were some suspicious people walking around our house and looking for Soviet citizens. Not many people know about it, but this moment was quite dangerous for Soviet citizens. The same situation as after the war in 1945 was being repeated – when Soviets were kidnapping Soviet citizens to Russia. I thus moved away with my husband and children and I was afraid to return to school.”
“(Dad) was wounded before April 22, 1942. And since he was wounded and sick – he did not have a kidney and he was old, he was thus not taken to a hospital but to our home instead. There was no medicine. He was injured, without a kidney, and sick – it was obvious. Dad suffered from horrible pain. It was terribly cold and mom was tying him to the bed so that he would not throw down the duvet from the bed. He cried with pain terribly, incessantly. On April 22, 1942 my mom could not stand it any more and she moved him onto a sledge, there was still snow in Leningrad, and she dragged him to a hospital. Mom was not returning for a long time. My sister and I went to look for her. We found her on a frozen staircase. She did not have strength to go up anymore. She said that when she had brought dad to the hospital, he was already dead.”
“In 1943 we were studying in basements, because during the air raids it did not make sense to keep running back and forth from the classroom to the basement all the time. We used a kerosene lamp for light and we practiced writing by writing in between lines of old newspapers because there was no paper. I had quite a prominent position in the class, because I could already read. Under a single kerosene lamp I read Andersen’s fairy tales most of all. I like the fairy tale bout the ugly duckling the most, and since that time I also still remember the tale of the tin soldier – how he melts due to love.”
Inna Rottová, née Želeněcová, was born August 22, 1935 in Leningrad. Her father Samuil Želeněc came from Prague and her mother Galina Štrasburk was from Warsaw, where they had got to know each other and whence they had fled to Russia. Both of them were Jews and they faced anti-Semitism as well as the Bolsheviks. They found a haven in Leningrad where they lived in 1941 when the war reached the city. The mother with Inna and her older sister Tamara remained in the besieged Leningrad. Their father went to combat, he was wounded and he died as a consequence of his injury in 1942. The mother and her daughters have survived the siege of Leningrad and they lived to see its end in January 1944. In 1953 Inna graduated from secondary school, but due to her Jewish origin she was not allowed to study the school of her choice. She eventually accepted her admission to a textile industry college, from which she graduated holding an engineer’s degree. In 1960 she married Czech student Jaromír Mirovský in the USSR and she followed him to Czechoslovakia in the same year. She worked in the Research Institute of A. S. Popov and then she taught at a vocational school. She passed a state examination in the Czech language, she continued in a postgraduate study and she raised two daughters. Nor she nor her husband have ever been members of the Communist Party. During the period of the Prague Spring she was collecting signatures for the petition in support of K 231 and due to her Soviet nationality she was hiding with her family during the occupation. When she refused to undertake political screening, she was dismissed from her job. Inna continued working as a freelance translator and interpreter. Her first short story was published in 1974 and her first book in 1984. Since that time she has published more than fifty novels and detective stories. In 1998 she divorced and she married Vladimír Jan Rott. Irina Rottová passed away on June, the 27th, 2018.
