Marta Sandtnerová

"And so here in one villa there lived this engineer, this kind of handsome man, and he was a Russian. He had a Russian wife and they lived here, and once they came and so on, then they grabbed him and took him away to Siberia. Because he was a White Guard, well those were those runaway Russians, when the revolution started there, they were running to Paris and here and anywhere outside of Russia. And he started a life here, lived here in peace, and those Russians came, and the next day, and the third day... They had to have been amazingly well-informed, where everyone was and what was here... He disappeared. And then he returned, after twenty years, or I don't know how long. And his wife lived here with his daughter and I later talked with that daughter and I asked her, how he was doing, when he returned. And she said that he was completely devastated and in the end I think that he committed suicide... That he couldn't bear it apparently. They were somewhere in those Gulags, somewhere in Siberia."

"And here there marched in this rude little man, who started to give out orders to everyone and immediately wanted some vodka. Well and my father's family, we didn't have anything, and we told him, that we can only offer him some water, that we don't have any alcohol here. And he wanted to start living here and was extremely rude, and so father handled him very courteously, but in the end he shouted: 'March!' at him. And he got scared and immediately left. And so we could see, that we had to be hard on them. And then some colonel came, who had his breasts full with military awards and him I sang The Lark's Song from Hubička and he bowed to me, hand on his heart, and was also trying to mediate some accommodations here. And so in the end we negotiated that, since I was a young girl, that they would put some women here, I mean female soldiers. And so some officer and her assistant came here, a girl that was younger than her, both extremely sad, these girls. Mother made them breakfast and they didn't eat it, because we apparently, as the bourgeois, want to poison them..."

"Those villas were usually Jewish, and so when those catastrophes happened with the Germans, then those people here either still managed to go somewhere out of the country, or some jumped out of their windows or shot themselves and so on. Because the Jewish families here were all rich families, there was one tragedy after another here. Well and even this villa that grandpa had built himself because of the atelier, so that he would have space for Palacký's memorial stone, so I guess actually right beside it, now it's a villa, that belongs to the government representatives. It was reconstructed in the year 1925, sometime, when mother was getting married and her brother was getting married as well, then this villa had to be divided into two apartments. And so that they would have enough money for the reconstruction, then before, because uncle was an architect, he first reconstructed the atelier for the villa, which later... And that money, which they gained from it, they invested here into this reconstruction. And that villa beside it was bought by a Jewish family, then later by doctor Somrněc; he was an advocate, I think. He had a wife and a son and fortunately that doctor died still before all those tragedies happened, and his wife and son went to a concentration camp and it was then taken by the Germans. Some obergruppenführer lived there, a very high rank. Because specifically here the villas were usually Jewish, this later became the German part of the city. All the way to Stromovka the villas were... Here around the corner lived Frank and various German families."