"Imagine that I was in such a group of students who were taking exams for high school. But those were... we were there for five days with the Salesians! It was shortly after the assassination of Heydrich. After the assassination... it shouldn't be called 'assassination'. And now my grandmother actually went a month and a half later. And I was so full of it with the admission process. Because we slept there for five days, the boys separately, the girls somewhere else. They took twenty-five of us, I think, and then they took five girls, or something like that. Now, we were drawing and writing something, and there was some of the... how they, the Germans, the NSDAP had this red badge and a white badge in the middle and there was a hakenkrajc. And he talked to us and he had a debate with us. And now - dad laughed so hard at what I spat out. We were learning German, two years of German, well... I was quite good at it, I thought. And now he came and asked me who had done the assassination. I didn't know what to say, so I said, 'Die böse Tschechen' ('The bad Czechs' - ed.) My father laughed, because what could he get from a boy... And what he wanted to hear was, 'Böse Tschechen'."
"So Grandma left with the transport. Very hurriedly, because she was old - sixty years old. And she wasn't that old - with us, I have a daughter who is sixty now. So she went and they went to Riga, they were still going to the Baltics. Because at that time Himmler basically ordered also a terrible thing, that to Riga, where there was a ghetto, that they would put those Jews who were partly... that's cynicism... deserving, because for example during the First World War they fought in the German army. So what the Sonderkommando did there was that they took... they marched by the hundreds to the outskirts of Riga and shot them at measured intervals. And by doing that, they 'cleared' the Riga ghetto, so to speak, for the Jews of Berlin to go there, but at the same time they sent the transport that my grandmother took. And that transport never arrived. They stopped in front of Riga and all the thousands got off. All 1,000 of them got off the train. There's a memorial there, like a yes and no... I didn't have the courage to go there, unfortunately, I didn't even know how. Afterwards. But all the thousands of them were shot there. That's terrible, that. And in the German way. They dug... if that grandmother's transport dug, that's no... those graves, but those Jews that they were clearing that Riga ghetto for that Himmler (plan), they dug there. They came by the hundreds for that Riga, and they dug their graves by the hundreds. There are pictures of that too, which I just quoted in the book. It's impossible to watch, these undressed women, huddling like that, and yet they've already dug their graves. I don't even think about it. It must have been terrible when they got there."
"Dad could not be a member of any party because soldiers did not have the right to vote. And mom didn't live politically. That was the student, cheerful society, as I tell you - Voskovec, Werich and the others who were there. There wasn't much talk about politics. If I have to do some research, I remember that my grandfather was a national democrat, Schindler. My father - nothing. And the Bořks - no, nothing. And no Röhr either. Although... when our dad defended himself against the fact that his pension was taken away after 1948, he wrote such a decomposition because... I was then... I started studying, and the family was practically with no money. So he wrote all kinds of dissections that I saw, and dad always said, 'I've always been a socialist, I've always been a democrat. But this, what they're doing to me, it's terrible.'"
Microbiologist Prof. Jiří Schindler was born on January 6, 1931 in Prague. He comes from a family with partly Jewish roots. He was eleven years old when he accompanied his grandmother, Ludvika Bořkovcová (née Röhrová), to the Jewish transport assembly point in Veletržní Street. Ludvika perished shortly afterward in a transport from Terezín to Riga, when the Nazis executed the entire thousand-person transport before it even reached its destination. Other relatives on his mother’s side did not survive the Holocaust either—Ludvika’s Jewish sisters and their families were all killed. Jiří’s mother, Magdalena, who was classified as a “first-degree Jewish mixed race” under the racist Nuremberg Laws, was protected by her mixed marriage to Jiří’s father, Zdeněk, a prewar pilot in the Czechoslovak army. In 1942, as his relatives were being sent to the transports, Jiří began attending grammar school. It was during his time as a sixth-form student that he witnessed the Communist coup. By then, he was already a member of the non-Communist National Socialist Youth. Nevertheless, he graduated in 1950 and was accepted to study at the Faculty of General Medicine of Charles University. He never joined the Communist Party, and his habilitation procedure, which began in 1969, was therefore stopped for cadre reasons. He became an associate professor after the Velvet Revolution, when he received a number of other professional awards, including a professorship in medical microbiology at Charles University. He died on 17 December 2023.
