“I [also] went through Belgium, through Bruges and Ghent and all the way to Amsterdam. And I was actually there on the twentieth of August. There I hitchhiked an older man. He was a man of the world, he was back then, he was such a European back then. He had a German wife and his children were somewhere around the world, they were in some non-profit organizations in South America, I think the daughter was a doctor, or the son was a doctor, or vice versa, I don't recall anymore, and they served here, so he was such a worldly person. Well, he was so excited that he ran into a person of Czech origin that he had to take me home and show me to his wife. And I said that I wanted to go for a swim somewhere by the sea. And he says: 'What would you do there, it's cold.' And I said: 'Well, I wanted to swim in the sea in Holland.' So he says: 'Yeah, I'll take you there and I'll come back in the evening.' So he came there, took me to their house, his wife cooked dinner, it was amazing, yeah, so we chatted. And in the morning they suddenly woke me up and, at about 6:30 in the morning, all terrified: 'There are Russians in your country.' And because at that time I was no longer living in Opletalova 59, but in Opletalova 9, which is right next to the brush, closer to Václavák, so the footage also covered this part of that Opletalka, so I said: 'This is my house.'' They: ‘Jesus!’ So it was all that dramatic. And he immediately took me the next day and went with me to Delft. And there was Dutch technology in Delft and they announced scholarships for Czechs that day. So he signed me up right away.“
"We had many visitors six times a week. As I already mentioned, mom had a lot of friends, so they actually met some acquaintances there. On the one hand, from Dad's circle of the "Spaniards" and the security guards, for he just did in that security. Mom was imprisoned in a concentration camp, she was in Auschwitz and in Ravensbrück, so she had a friend from that camp. Moreover, she was, in fact both my parents were pre-war party members, so they had a lot of friends from the leftist culture, especially my mother. So there were still people there, that's why my brother and I never smoked, because it was so much smoke indoors, that's the only thing I remember from my childhood."
Jiří Závodský was born on August 9, 1949 in Prague. His father Osvald Závodský fought in the civil war in Spain, spent part of the Second World War in concentration camps, and from 1950 worked as the commander of the State Security (StB). He was arrested in 1951 and executed in 1954 after a political trial. Jiří Závodská’s mother, Helena Závodská, was also active in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) during the first republic and survived the concentration camps, but a large part of her family died in them. Although friends of both parents often visited the Závodský houses, Jiří Závodský and his brother did not know their father’s story for a long time and only learned about it in the early 1960s, when he was rehabilitated. In the summer of 1968, Jiří Závodský went to Great Britain on a temporary assignment, on August 21 he was just returning via Amsterdam. After the news about the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, he stayed in Holland for a few days, but finally decided to return. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and spent his entire life professionally working with computers. After 1989, he founded his own company with his colleagues, which operated for over thirty years. In 2022 he lived in Prague.
