"The canvases were deposited in banks in France. A woman came there with the help from a lawyer who didn't defend my grandfather's interests and disclosed it. She had bought various paintings for Hitler and Göring, he revealed it to her and it was confiscated for a ridiculous sum. The first refusal was that my grandfather was actually a collaborator and therefore not entitled to ask for anything. The fact that my grandfather was a prominent member of the tesistance who had warned Russia about the attack and so on has become known primarily thanks to my son. He found declassified records in the United States Congress about the resistance and how Stalin infiltrated the democratically elected bodies of the United States. This testimony was declassified, I think, in 1980 or thereabouts. My son Lukáš found it and made a copy of it and sent it to me, and then the Department of National Defence acknowledged rather quickly that my grandfather was a member of the Resistance and no collaborator at all, and that this reason was contestable. So, when this was done, the restitution attempt was de facto accepted, but with the proviso that I had to fight for it again in France."
"Then I found a friend from school. She was a member of a 'communist aristocracy' family '68. She was the granddaughter of Stanislav Kostka Neumann and the niece of Stanislav Neumann who became a collaborator. She was not afraid of the StB at all, which everyone else around me seemed to be. My parents would always warn me in the 1960s when my father was imprisoned in Ilava for subverting the republic and so on, so I knew that the suspicion that someone could be with the StB was not to be taken lightly; it was very real. This friend of mine named Šárka was not as much brave as she was a member of that faction of the Communist Party that respected people like Kriegel, Dubček, Mlynář, etc. I found her at home and we agreed that the best thing to do would be some kind of protest. She took me to a group that was preparing the text of a document called The Czech Black Book, which was published later. They were basically leftist intellectuals collecting documentation because they were aware of how thoroughly Stalin had destroyed archives in the past that contained records of his crimes and the crimes of other people, or that it was very important to make a record of what was going on because the Russians would lie."
"Less than a year before they arrested the whole group, they called my father and offered him collaboration with the StB. He spoke to me at the time; I was already in college, and he asked... I told him I didn't mind losing my college education, it was perfectly fine, he should resist them, I would continue to respect him, and it was no point trying to save me. So he rejected them, and when they detained him before questioning him on the theft of alcohol and other things like that, before they started with the political charges, the first thing they said to him was, 'You didn't expect us to get you here so quickly when you refused to collaborate, did you?.' That's what they told him; it's not anywhere in the record - he just told me how happy they were to get him so quickly. Only then did the actual interrogation begin, which first went along the lines of proving him various theft, mischief, etc., and when that absolutely failed and even they could see the absurdity of it all, only then did the political interrogation begin."
Michal Wagner was born in Prague-Bubeneč on 9 June 1940. His close relatives were strongly involved in the anti-Nazi resistance during the war. His grandfather Josef Škvor, the sales director of Škoda Plzeň, personally informed Moscow about Germany’s plans to attack the Soviet Union, and his father Vladimír Wagner was involved in the preparation of Prime Minister Eliáš’s “sandwich affair”. As a bourgeois millionaire family, the Communist regime persecuted them following February 1948. This culminated in a show trial in 1962 and the conviction of the father for subverting the republic. He graduated from the Faculty of Science in organic chemistry and took a job in the biochemical laboratory of the Plzeň hospital. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he became a member of a group of young leftist intellectuals who documented the August developments. At the end of 1968, he accepted an offer for a scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania and flew there with his wife and son on the last day of the year. He worked at several prestigious universities and a pharmaceutical company in the United States, and spent a lot of time on activity in self-help organisations. He took part in promting their ideas in the Czech environment after his return to his homeland in 1991. He lived in Prague in 2024.
