Emil Rýva

"I perceive it sub specie of my eighty-four years in such a way that he succumbed to the pre-war and then the post-war euphoria. It wasn't pre-war euphoria, but he, like most visual artists, tended towards left-wing political thinking to appear progressive. After the war, as a result of the euphoria that others also succumbed to, he remained in this political thinking. And he even improved it afterward when he became a kind of a politically exploited, recognized artist. He also supported this later, for example, when he received the Klement Gottwald state award. It was because he painted views of Prague from his studio, which he magnified by the fact that there was always a star shining on some object in Prague, similar to the mine in Ostrava, so he placed there as such a decoration, those five-pointed stars. So he was trying to fit - today it's called the mainstream - into the mainstream, to flow with the mainstream. Otherwise, I don't know if he harmed anyone. Maybe he could have harmed some of his colleagues with some of his strong political positions, but I can't judge that. They would have to comment on that. They are practically no longer alive today either, so... His image, as I have fixed it, is that he was a person of a broad, basically benevolent nature."

"That was the fall of 1953. I was assigned to a special facility, which was not even established in the military law. That is, it was an act or a facility that was completely outside the laws, decrees, and regulations in force at the time. And it came down to the fact that persons who, according to the party or municipal authorities, were objectionable in some way or had an objectionable class origin were practically put to forced labor, either in mines or the construction industry, on road construction and the like." - " You were assigned there directly?" - "I was assigned directly there. And this facility had such a peculiarity that whoever entered there did not know how long he would stay there because it depended very much on how he would be politically vetted. I could never imagine that because I was there due to my class origin. I could not imagine how I could be vetted for this class origin, which was virtually unchangeable. How could it change? So it was a rather unpleasant circumstance when someone is deployed somewhere and doesn't know for how long. There was a lot of seniors who had been there for maybe the fourth or fifth year, or maybe even longer."