“I played soccer with the German kids. There were no problems, no national conflicts. This had not crossed our minds once. So the Czech-German cohabitation had long been very peaceful. It was calm all the way until 1933 when Hitler came to power as did Henlein, leader of the Sudetenland nationalists. Then the situation deteriorated and events followed, leading to the Second World War.”
“I have had this great party-political trouble at the University of Economics. As head of the department I suggested to expel one Soviet citizen. She wasted no time and filed a complaint with the municipal department of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. After that, a disciplinary procedure had been launched against me, based on which I was expelled from the Party, from the management of the department, and the ongoing process for my PhD. and professorship had been suspended. So I was personally seriously affected by that. Despite all of that, my work is assessed positively. I am in fact the only author of monographs on subject didactics. Not only didactics of teaching of foreign languages which is my own domain, but subject didactics as such.“
“That expulsion of Germans... First of all I witnessed the march of German platoons which were assigned to clean up the rubble. That went on very peacefully, nobody paid attention to them. Also unnoticed were the German citizens who were standing in Hora Svaté Kateřiny, waiting for transportation. Nobody insulted them. I was not present to any violence; it all took place in a peaceful manner. Excesses could have taken place somewhere but if you consider what happened during the occupation, what horrors we had to live through… Furthermore we were learning about the horrors from concentration camp returnees. So it is of no surprise that excesses happened. But only excesses; exceptions. Apart from that, the explusion was fairly orderly, as decided by the great powers. The decision on Germans‘ expulsion was made at the Potsdam Conference and it was a decision of the great powers. President Beneš was but a clerk there, so to say. He merely formalized it with his signature to the laws on Czechoslovak citizenship.“
“I perceived the establishment of the Israeli state positively because of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. They went there to seek refuge, in fact. My brother-in-law was complaining about anti-semitism which was somewhat common in Czechoslovakia after the war. It is even today, it is inexplicable, but it still exists here. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law did not want to be citizens of a state where this was happening. And so that when a state was created just for them in the Middle East, they made use of this opportunity. As for my wife, she kept saying she could never live in Israel because of the heat. This was the only reason.”
Radomír Choděra was born on 20 February 1925 in Ústí nad Labem. In October 1938, following the signature of the Munich Agreement, he and his family left his hometown and moved to Radomír‘s grandparents‘ in Český Brod. After half a year, the family settled down in Prague. As a grammar-school student, he took part in the Prague Uprising at the end of WW II where he helped building barricades. He graduated in Russian language and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Prague and became a university teacher. He is a prominent expert on didactics, in particular didactics of foreign languages.
