Petr Císařovský

"And I was automatically given the Czech Fine Arts Fund's card after I graduated. There was one aspect to it, too, which was that once, when I was coming from a wine bar at night, I was stopped by policemen somewhere near the National Theatre. I was scared that I would be arrested, like most of those little girls were arrested, right, but they opened my ID card, and there was the Czech Fine Arts Fund card. He looked at it, saluted and said, 'Carry on.' So I was a little bit ashamed that I had a kind of a social exception, you could say, but actually that's how it was, that the artists had simply earned this special status within the society. So we were entitled to get some studio space, but of course they were given if somen´body did you a favour only, so I had to pay twenty thousand to an old man, an artist who couldn't go up to the fourth floor, which was a lot of money in those days, to get me on the certificate."

"First of all, he [my father] saw the fire and the shooting in Lidice from the tower of the church in Hostouň, because it is not far from Hostouň. Of course, he lost friends and a distant relative there, so it affected him very strongly. Then during the Prague Uprising he went with some friends to help, he saw the retreating units of Vlasov's Army. He went with them to the centre of Prague and helped with the machine gun belt. He was slightly wounded. He also told me that there he saw all the atrocities that were going on afterwards. And when they came back as heroes, the few boys who had gone from Hostouň to help fight, they were first celebrated, then the mayor called them and said, 'You stupid boys, I'd like to beat you up, because don't you know what happened to Lidice?' So my father very quickly took such a skeptical view of patriotism and these things. He didn't even sign up for any resistance or anything, and he always said it was a matter of course, his showing up at that rank, and that you just shouldn't give medals for that, that it should be a natural thing."