“I came in one day wearing a green UNRRA polo-neck sweater. We were forced to wear paramilitary attire – basically green dungarees, shirts, and ties. I was wearing the roll-neck sweater, and a general or other high-ranking officer came to a parade. He stopped by me, goggled at me and said: ‘Comrade, do you really have to wear a sweater?’ I duly saluted, like Švejk would, and yelled: ‘I do!’ He shut up, then he asked me over, and my officer said: ‘Listen, since you have a sore throat, and your leg was bad the other day… why don’t you file for being recognised as unfit for the military? I mean, all you do here is cause trouble.’ I thought: ‘That’s not a bad idea, escaping the military service.’ As medicine students, we did hands-on training at various clinics, and so I somehow obtained a certificate of how sick I was, and was released from the military. Actually, not from the military – I was released from the military department of the university. Then, however, I faced having to serve for two years unlike my friends who would serve for just a year. I needed a certificate of being unfit. Long story short, I did some more tricks to get the ‘blue book’ certificate, as it was called, though I won’t divulge any more details on how I did that. And as I was happy and grateful for having this, I got it for more friends of mine later on when I was a physician. So, that’s how we got certified as ‘unfit for the military.’”
“That’s where I witnessed the arrival of Russians and Romanians. They behaved in ways that… well it depends. Of course, with all due respect, they were our liberators, but I remember my father being remorseful. He was a witness to something he never thought would end up the way it did. A Russian soldier raped a woman in the neighbourhood; the local men got up and went to complain with the Russian officer. He had the soldiers lined up, the woman pointed at the one who did it, and the officer took him aside and shot him right there. My dad was in remorse because he felt he had somehow contributed to that man’s death by complaining about him. Things like that just happened during the war. They found a German family hiding in the cellar at Staňkova 3; the street was called Dlouhá back then. They took them out, trembling, and wanted to kill them, but that didn’t happen eventually, though I don’t know exactly what happened in the end. What I know is that Russians wanted to set the house on fire. Such were my experiences in my immediate neighbourhood in Staňkova.”
“I wanted to go to Brno, applied for a job with the Second Surgical Clinic, and was lucky; it was 1968. There had been a thaw in ’67 already, and I won the selection procedure for the Second Surgical Clinic. There were four of us and I was lucky; I won and was hired on 1 January 1968. It was the clinic that Professor Navrátil had helmed, but he was no longer there. He left for Vienna on 1 January 1968. It was like a twist of fate… Do you believe in fate? I don’t, really, though sometimes I am led to believe that something such as fate does exist. See, when I was taking my state final examination in surgery, the examiner, Professor Navrátil, gave me an A. He said: ‘I couldn’t give you an A+, because that’s just not done, dear colleague, but I’m sure we will meet again.’ That was it. I knew right there and then I would be a surgeon. As I was taking the final exams in internal medicine, gynaecology and obstetrics, and then Marxism-Leninism, I got almost kicked out over Marxism-Leninism; that was horrible. Some teachers put in a word for me, and I eventually passed with the worst grade possible. Professor Navrátil... Indeed, I did meet him down the line. He would occasionally come back to operate on his former patients and in special cases, and I was honoured to be his assistant. Back then, heart surgery was a matter of many hours. We would leave the table four hours after the surgery was over, and they called us back a moment later saying the heart was failing. We had to open the chest and revise the operation – to see what happened and why. It was tough schooling, assisting Professor Navrátil.”
Rudolf Vévoda was born in Brno on 22 June 1935. His father Rudolf worked as an accountant and his mother Boleslava was a preschool teacher in Brno’s Kociánka neighbourhood. Rudolf Vévoda recalls the deportations of their Jewish neighbours to concentration camps, the presence of the Hitlerjugend in the streets of Brno, air raids of the city, and violent acts committed during the liberation by Red Army. The communists imprisoned his father for several months in 1953 over his contacts with the period Agrarian Party members whom the regime persecuted. Rudolf Vévoda completed his medicine studies in Brno at the turn of the 1950s and 1960, graduating in 1961, and worked at several healthcare facilities. In 1968 he joined the surgical clinic of the Nemocnice u sv. Anny (St. Anne’s Hospital) in Brno where he got to operate alongside globally recognised surgeon, Professor Jan Navrátil, among others. Later on, he left surgery to work at a urology clinic and worked his way up the ranks to become the head physician. He held additional managerial positions during the latter half of the 1980s: the Head of the Policlinic in Viniční Street and the Head of the Municipal Healthcare Authority (MÚNZ). Even though he enjoyed career success and held leading positions, he had never joined the communist party (CPC). He was living in Brno in 2022.
