“I passed the exam and I proceeded to the second grade of grammar school. About half a year later – I don’t remember exactly – the principal came to me, called me out of the class and told me that I had to leave the school. And I didn’t know why. This brought great confusion in my head, because mom had been hiding this issue from me. Dad was no longer alive. We were members of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, and bishop Novák was my teacher of religion. I was crying. I came home and mom had to tell me something about being Jewish, because I had absolutely no idea what it was.”
“He was an immensely elegant gentleman, as I got to know him when I was a child or a teenager, and he would probably not hurt anybody. He was a man you call a posh person. His professional qualities are judged by others, I am not in that position, but I remember him as a man who was always nice and kind to these children. I don’t doubt that he had his faults, too, but I was not affected by it.”
“I have to thank my colleagues because they taught me all the examination methods in gastroenterology, and patients from the clinic gradually began coming to me to the health centre. I began to focus on gastroenterology and I can say – and I am not ashamed of that, whether somebody acknowledges it or not – I can say that I was basically a founder of children gastroenterology. I was the first who introduced endoscopic examination methods for children.”
“I think that what we learnt in Disman’s ensemble is what the present-day generation of actors lacks. We had to be able to speak, we had to know how to articulate and use the tone of the voice and all this technique of speaking. That’s what they taught us there. And I have to say that it has probably influenced me for a long time afterwards. Not only that I later continued with similar activity, but when I was then teaching medical students or giving lectures at conferences for experts, abroad, too, I always had that good feeling that people were able to understand me.”
“I met Tomáš Kosta one day, I remember it well; it was before they hanged Slánský and all the others. And he was scared, because his mom got arrested. He told me that she was in solitary confinement, and they had the lights on in her cell 24 hours a day and she was not allowed to sit, and so on. And it raised doubts in me because this was from a close person; we were learning all this unofficially, newspapers did not write about these things. I remember that after I met Tomáš and he told me this, I wasn’t even able to sleep.”
Miloše Sedláčková was born into the family of Emil and Anastázie Fuchs. Her father was of Jewish origin, and she was expelled from the grammar school during the war for being Jewish. She was also not allowed to perform in the Disman Radio and Theatre Ensemble of which she was a member. After the war she stayed in the ensemble of Olga Putzkerová, which separated from the Disman’s ensemble when the communist regime began gaining power. In 1949 she graduated from grammar school and successfully passed the admission tests to the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. Later she became a specialist in children gastroenterology. She is the author of pioneering works on the Helicobacter pylori bacteria which causes stomach ulcers in adults and children. After the Soviet occupation in 1968 she was discriminated at work and was not allowed to lecture. In spite of this, she managed to continue with developing her specialization thanks to the help of her friends. She was rehabilitated in 1989.
