Ivan Theimer

"I got lucky. Three months before it I received a permit from the artists' association in Olomouc to obtain a passport. It was at the police station, I hadn't had it. I wanted to go see an exhibition of Henri Matisse in Paris and to visit Nice. They organized a tour with designers from Olomouc. Then the invasion took place but I already had my passport. I took the train to Prague - the French embassy opened up at 7 a.m. All of us who slept over received stamps. Then I went to Munich. But at the railway stations someone told us: 'Don't go there. Sometimes, the Russian soldiers board the train, confiscate your passports and turn the train back to Prague.' There were ten or twelve of us on the train. Because of the people who warned me that there was no point in bringing a suitcase, I only had a tiny bag. I had a toothbrush and Kafka's Amerika. We got to the border, the Russians came and checked the whole train but didn't want to see our papers. They let the train go across the border where there were Czechoslovak soldiers who weren't on board with the Russians. It wasn't manipulated yet. A major and a policeman came over, asking for passports. They looked up and could see that I only had the tiny bag. I was drenched in sweat. Then the train drove on and we got across the German border. There Americans and Germans handed us coke through the window."

"I got to know people such as Marcel Zerbib. He had the first surrealist gallery after WW II., located on the Saint-Germain boulevard by Diderot's statue. He was friends with Manree (?), having a life-long contact for all his photos. His brother had a tiny gallery in Rue des Beaux Arts. He came there, inviting his brother, Claude Bernard, Albert Lebel - all sons of renowned gallery owners. And he said: 'Please, make an exhibition of Theimer. It's impossible - buy his paintings!' But nobody did. So he said: 'I'm buying fifteen of them!' They were wondering why this elderly Marcel who had no longer owned a gallery but still had collections - Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, all of the surrealists - did that. Then they realized. His brother Armand Zerbib organized my first exhibition in 1971. All of the exhibitions I had at his gallery turned out well. This is how it started. Certain collectors were interested, I established links to Lyon, Geneva and to Italy."