Antonín Doležal

"Professor Hynie [Dr. Josef Hynie] came to see me one day. Professor Hynie and I were very friendly despite our age gap. We were very open and spoke 'without a filter' so to speak. He mentioned gay males and said this was something that needed correcting. Such were his arguments. I told Lukáš [Dr. Josef Lukáš] what Hynie had told me, and Lukáš thought about it and said: 'Poor guys. They miss out on so much, and yet they should be punished for this on top of it all?' So, using his diplomatic approach, he achieved for Czechoslovakia to become the first country in 1960 where homosexuality was not punishable. Dr. Lukáš made it all happen through his diplomatic approach, really."

"I was offered to head a San Remo maternity hospital back in 1968. While I was there, I cured an Italian millionaire of constipation, and he wanted to show his gratitude and offered me this. At that time, when the Soviet troops were already here, I merrily chose freedom because I wanted to do what I enjoyed, and here is where I had earned it. I couldn't leave people who depended on me here and say, 'I have this now...' and be an obstetrician in San Remo, you know, 'signora this and signora that.' That wouldn't satisfy me; I'd been working in research here. As we said: research is pushing forward, asking questions, and not being content with what there is, and so that was the driving force of my life, you know?"

“Then came the occupation. The Germans drove up and down Crown Avenue, they had such terrible cars, it was called the tin circus. Dad was in the bathroom, burning all of the documents. Some two days later I was in Čáslavská Street, and one gentleman was just crossing the road. Suddenly, he made a run for it, a car drove up, two people jumped out and started shooting. They shot him in the leg, I just happened to be there. And the man who was there, who they’d caught, was German. So I told Dad about it, who didn’t say anything of course. Then after the war, he said that he [the German in Čáslavská Street - ed.] had been waiting for someone. So that was as close a shave as it gets.”

“Opinion influence? The greatest authority for us was our father, for sure, he was a fighter. When the war broke out in Spain, Dad started working for Red Aid and later organised border crossings for social democrats who were escaping from Germany through here to Hungary and onwards. Dad took part in that. And let’s say that back then Dad had already started leaning more to the left. And there was one incident when the Alexandr Ensemble was here and my parents went to see them perform at Lucerna. And no one was allowed to get in touch or speak with the musicians, it wasn’t allowed. But Dad was surprised to see that the there were members, legionaries of Medek’s independent unit from the right-wing part of the legions there, in the auditorium, who clapped and were enthusiastic supporters of an alliance with Russia at the time. You see, when you look at it the way it’s seen from a present-day perspective, it’s all shifted, but seen as it was back then, it was different.”

“A legionary lived next door, a retired friend of Dad’s, and the whole time, from dusk till dawn, he listened to the radio, all kinds of stations, and scrounged for news all through the war. That was his life. He spoke Russian, no other [foreign] languages. And he ran, saying he’d heard: ‘Churchill, India, twenty millions’, and he said: ‘Mrs Doležalová, this is it! Churchill is in India, and they’re preparing a twenty-million-strong army of Indian soldiers, who’ll come to the aid of the Russians – I guess we’ll be liberated by the Indians.’”