"When I came in 1975, all the presidents of all ten district courts in Prague were the so-called graduates of the PŠP." - “What is PŠP?” – "The Workers' Law School. Which they pulled a healthy, "politically sane" guy over there from the machine and in one year of boarding school he had a high school diploma and in two more years he graduated from law faculty with a law degree. And these people went straight to court. As I say, that replaced a lot of the fired judges from that turn of the forties and fifties. The then Minister of Justice Čepička praised it highly, saying that it was a miracle the world had never seen. It really hadn't been remembered until then!"
"Emigrants from Prague were the overwhelming majority. In the countryside - nothing against it, but if they had this 'leaving the republic without consent' in Rakovník, if they had five cases a year, that was too many. Maybe not even that, especially in the smaller districts. But here in Prague it was like a treadmill. And there was really no way for the lawyer to avoid it." - "And what was the role of the lawyer in such a case? Those people weren't here, you had no one to realistically defend you." - "Like this: he did. Because I was always... Of course, it also depended on the lawyer assigned to me, because I was always in contact with the family, with the relatives who were here, especially in cases where, for example, the criminal prosecution had been initiated, and at the same time the person in question was already in Germany, for example, asking for a so-called adjustment of relations with the Republic, that is, either emigration or release from the state. And if it was already imminent, then the matter could be delayed a little bit and then the prosecution as such was stopped, because in the meantime the person had adjusted his relations, redeemed himself, paid for the schools he had attended here, and that was it. So, yes, the role of the defense attorney was, I don't know, in eight cases out of ten purely formal, because it had to be, but in two cases, maybe these people could have been helped in some way."
"To become at least that candidate, it was discussed several times. I always tried to get out of it somehow. Then in the early 1980s, when the pressure was building up again: that I should also consider my position and that it would be appropriate if I... So I had, I admit this only now with hindsight, an agreement with that one national-front political party, the Czechoslovak Socialist Party, or the National Socialist Party, I had an agreement with them: if my future in the advocacy was threatened, I would join this party immediately." - "Does that mean that you would join either the People's Party or the Socialists?" - "The Socialists. The People's Party, with thoseI was not on good terms." - "To the Socialists, to avoid..." - "To avoid membership in the Communist Party. That was the only... Many people did that. Or rather, they had, these two political parties, numerus clausus, or if somebody died, then they could accept somebody, but otherwise the number of members was simply closed and the party was not allowed to accept any youth."
"The concept of that study at the law school was built on the fact that the first exam at the law school was the History of the International Workers' Communist Movement. That was the first exam in the winter semester of 1969. And that was followed by these other exams with political content, that is... The central exam there was the state exam, a four-semester exam - that was the whole first and the whole second year - in political economy, national economic planning, political and economic theory, and all that. And that was tested by a committee, and I dare say that almost a third of the students quit there, on that state exam, and they didn't go any further." - "Because it was really taken so seriously, or because these people were so disgusted with it that they were unable to continue doing it?" - "Well, maybe a combination of both. Plus there was another moment, which was that there were no textbooks and scripts and so on. Or there were no study aids, because those were declared to be so-called defective. So one had to go to school as a day study... as a common school or a grammar school, and the lectures turned into the fact that, therefore, one had to write it all down, because one had nothing to draw from afterwards. And then the same thing was that, of course, in those seminars it was further discussed. It was all politics. Of course, this was then followed by other exams, that is, sociology, scientific communism, Marxist philosophy, and in the fifth year there was also the theory of state and law, which was again the legal theories and the ideas of how it would be wonderful sometime in the future."
"When Gabčík, Kubiš and the others landed here, they had pockets full of money in various currencies. This was money for bribes, of course, intended for bribes - and for survival. Someone had to get that money. And only Zbrojovka could get that money, because Zbrojovka had a lot of those pre-war contracts all over the world. After the fifteenth of March 1939, the German government claimed that Zbrojovka was therefore German and that they were the legal representatives and that those governments - mostly they were governments - those customers, those buyers, so that they had to send it, the money, to Germany. There were governments that bent over backwards for Hitler, particularly some in Latin America, that openly collaborated with Germany. But the other governments didn't recognise that, and on the contrary they recognised the Brno Armoury in Paris first, then in London. And the payments that were supposed to be coming in were going to London. And that financed the resistance. What few people know."
"Both uncles went to different places, including Auschwitz. Then, after Auschwitz was cleared out, they were on the death marches. The uncle, the younger one, miraculously survived, or rather he got to the places where the Red Army was already there, so that saved him, while the other uncle, František, he probably died somewhere on the death march, sometime in the first decade of March 1945."
František Schulmann was born on 5 March 1947 in Great Britain into a Czech-Jewish family. His father, JUDr. Jan Schulmann, was of Jewish origin. He was sent by Zbrojovka Brno in January 1939 as a delegate to Paris, thanks to which he escaped Nazi persecution. After the fall of France, he lived in Great Britain and worked closely with the London government-in-exile. He was the director of the British branch of the Brno Armaments Factory, whose proceeds financed, among other things, the Czechoslovak anti-Nazi resistance. Jan’s parents survived the war in Terezín and his brothers went through Auschwitz: the youngest, Jiří, returned, but the middle one, František - a poet known under the pseudonym Jiří Daniel - died during the death march. After the war, Jan took his wife Hana to Britain and in England a son and daughter were born to the Schulmanns. In 1949, Hana’s brother, the priest Alexander Heidler, later known as “Father Krisztan” from Radio Free Europe, fled to Munich. Nevertheless, the Schulmann family of four decided to return to Czechoslovakia in 1950, and František grew up in Dejvice, Prague. After elementary school, he trained as a locksmith, and only then was he allowed to study at the evening grammar school. He spent the Prague Spring and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in the army. In 1969-1974, he studied law at the Faculty of Law of Charles University and then joined the Law Office No. 5, where he remained until the fall of the communist regime. He describes the conditions at the faculty and the possibilities that an attorney actually had during the normalization period. In 1990 he graduated from the Academy of American and International Law at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1993 to 1996 he was deputy managing partner at Baker & McKenzie in Prague and was involved in a number of investment and privatization projects and mergers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. He currently works at Schulmann & Stachová, where he focuses on commercial and administrative law, real estate and representation before courts. He lives in Prague.
