“Another story is about my uncle. He left me a leather box that was full of bullets. These were bullets that he had removed from his patients in the days when he worked as a military surgeon. He collected all these bullets and kept them in his box which he then passed on me. He was with the army and treated the wounded soldiers. The dead were put to one side, the wounded but still living on the other side. And he treated the wounded, mostly removing their tattered legs with a saw. Every doctor in the army specialized in something and my uncle specialized in sawing off legs. I once asked him how he did it, whether the patients were given any pain killers. He would just laugh and told me: ‘Good boy, there was nothing like that back in the days. They were given a few sips of liquor, two soldiers would hold him tight, two more would hold his legs and…’ I still remember hearing him saying this, as if it was today. ‘Anesthesia, on the front line, you’ve got to be kidding me, there was nothing like that there. I pulled up his pants and started sawing. And when I was finished, I started anew with another man’s leg. And here you are, keep this suitcase. It’s full with shrapnel. Russian shrapnel, German shrapnel, French shrapnel… I pulled all of this out of people. And I’m not kidding you’. There was no point in kidding a little boy. I later would see some of those who had survived this. The amputees. The state would give them these wooden prostheses, a wooden leg, and a newsstand and that was it. There was no reward, no compensation other than that. Or even worse, he was given a barrel organ and played and begged for money on the streets.”
“I still remember that my dad would accompany me to kindergarten. Even though I was still too small for kindergarten, they put me in Kindergarten as I was allegedly doing mischief at home. So my dad would take me to Kindergarten in the morning when he went to his work at the court on the square in Litomyšl. There was this little fenced off pond and as soon as my dad said goodbye I lay down and stayed there till he came back at noon. When he saw that I had been spending my day fishing in the pond instead of going to school, he went completely mad. I remember the hassle: ‘what are thinking! You’re all wet!’ I got beaten, yelled at and the next day it was the same thing over again. I just kept staying at the pond fishing till noon!”
“I was in Litomyšl in the national house. It was astonishing, a brand new building, almost like the national theater. It is still there today, survived the changing times. And in that building they staged the ceremony to celebrate the Kaiser. The ceremony was supposed to be initiated by the smallest pupil, which was accidentally me. Alright, my dad was the district judge in Litomyšl, so there might have been a certain measure of helpful connections that made it happen, this has always been like that. And I began to recite: ‘It’s already been 67 years/since our Kaiser took up his reign/still in full blossom like a young tree/he’ll stay here with us forever’. But he was already gone by next year. My schoolmates would afterwards mock me: ‘but you said he’d stay here with us forever. But he didn’t’. He passed away in 1916.”
“In the days of the retributions for the assassination of Heydrich, I was the chairman of the court in Volyně. The situation was so tense that when I spoke to JUDr. Kraus, a local attorney at law, so we naturally spoke about the war. And when we were leaving, we had to make up a cover story. Because there were people watching us talk and if he had come to my apartment the next day and asked me what I discussed with Mr. Kraus and I would have said something different than Kraus, we would both have been arrested.”
“Why they kicked me out of the court? I was responsible for civil-rights affairs. A friend of mine was in charge of criminal-law proceedings. He told me: ‘I’ll probably not be back by tomorrow, I have two small cases tomorrow, could you please jump in for me?’ I told him: ‘leave the files on the table, I’ll not even bother to read through it, somebody probably stole something somewhere. Two or three days should do’. It had to do with some Mr. Zelenka or Zelený. I asked him if he had been convicted. He said no. Well, I had his criminal record where you can see everything he did, his entire past. I asked him if he had ever been in Slovakia. He said he had never been there. From his record, I could see that he had been convicted in Slovakia. He had been sentenced to two years on probation. ‘So you’ve never been to Slovakia?’ ‘No, never’. ‘You’ve never been in Slovakia?’ ‘Maybe you got into a fight there with somebody in a tavern?’ ‘No!’ I said to myself: ‘I’ll teach you not to lie!’ I sentenced him to three days on probation as I was mad at him for lying to me. I was a young guy back then. It was a mistake. The next day when I came to work, I saw a notice: ‘Action committee – leave your office immediately!’ I went to see the president of the court in Písek, PhD Pyska. He told me: ‘well, Mr. Žemlička, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs’.”
Zdeněk Žemlička was born on December 24, 1908, in Pelhřimov. He was greatly influenced by his maternal grandfather, Rudolf Rupp, a local printer and bookseller. After graduating from the local grammar school in 1927, he went to Prague to study law like his father had done before him. He lived in the newly built Masaryk dorms in Dejvice. After graduating, on September 22, 1932, he joined the court in České Budějovice. In 1937, he started his career as a district judge in Vimperk, where he worked until 1938. After the occupation of the Sudetenland, he moved to Volyň, where he then worked for the next twelve years. In 1948, the local Communists deprived him of the office of judge, dismissed him and forced him to move with his family to Prague. For two months, he was not getting any salary and for the two ensuing years he would search in vain for employment in his field. On the recommendation of JUDr. Karl Klose, who was his friend and at that time worked at the Interior Ministry, he was finally able to take up a job at the KOVOMAT national enterprise as a corporate lawyer. In 1968, he was appointed chairman of the Prague 10 court senate by the national council. He retired at the age of eighty. Until the age of ninety-seven years, he would regularly drive his Trabant around Pelhřimov. Since 2013, he has been living in the Karel Boromejský home for the elderly in Prague, Řepy. He is the oldest man in the country.
