Reginald Kefer

"[Mum] studied at a teacher's institute, but after graduation she married Dad. And there's an incredible transformation of a nineteen-year-old girl, admired, adored - she was a friend of Natasha Gollová - belonging to the Smíchov youth or something like that, that she became Dad's co-worker. And the change to such heroism - at the time when she was supporting him, at the time when he was being persuaded to join the Germans - she wasn't persuading him. I don't know, it must have been German... But she gave him a tremendous confidence, a charge to survive and a charge to endure."

"Dad wasn't broken, so to break him they put him in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, which were actually stone quarries. It's in a beautiful countryside and the concentration camp was de facto set up so that they would have labour force for the quarries. My father was there for two months and he died."

“Look, nowadays people say: ‘The Anti-Charter. We had to sign it or else...’ Bullshit ‘had to’. Look here, they called for us. People took taxis to go sign it. Literally. I remember they called for us – for Jaromír Nohejl, the chief of the philharmonic, and me, the chief of the theatre – to the district committee of the Party, so we’d sign. Jaromír Nohejl was an orator, I stutter. Jaromír Nohejl told them very tactfully that he would gladly sign it after having read it, considered it, and then fine. I nodded in agreement. I didn’t do any more than that, it was all Nohejl. Why should I blather, he said it so magnificently. I couldn’t have said it better. So they let us go and nothing happened. Nothing happened because those few people who didn’t sign were lost in the sea of those rushing to do it. And also, if they’d found out that two people from Olomouc hadn’t signed, it would’ve been trouble for the Communists.”

“And my happiest day was 17 November. Look, people started publicly ditching their [Party] membership cards, which I think... I’m a coward, now I’m all hero-like. No, I was just tactful and that was it. The interesting thing is that during those interviews [Party political probes]... They asked me about my attitude... I was proud of one thing, that I never said I agreed with the entry of the [Soviet] forces, and I never said I was content with the religious issue. And yet everyone had to say that. And during those interviews they also asked me about the entry [of Warsaw Pact forces], and so I told them I reckoned it was very cruel. That under certain circumstances I’d invite them through the door, but when they come climbing in through the window, no thank you. And the whole time there was this Mrs Otýpková at the Brno radio station, and she was an awfully refined lady and everyone respected her, even later dissidents. And I was to go sign it there. It didn’t say there that I agreed [with the invasion - trans.], but something like... And I said: ‘But it’s written here differently than what I said.’ And she started yelling at me: ‘Then you can change it!’ And that’s when I was a coward. I signed it. But if it had been anyone else than that respected Mrs Otýpková. And so I didn’t want to quarrel with the graceful old lady. I admit to cowardice. I was a coward there.”

“The Gestapo came. They confiscated the huge library. He [my father] called it an office, it was an even greater mess than this here, books all over the place. But he wrote everything in the dining room. But they took all the manuscripts with them. They stored the rest, sealed it, and arrested Dad. They searched the house, but they were mainly after the manuscripts. He was interned in Pankrác and then in that prison on Charles Square, and they always took him for questioning at Petschek Palace, where Mum had to go. I was there with her a few times. The point of the debates was for her to persuade Dad to join the Germans. It was known that Hitler, Himmler, and so on dabbled in the ocult and that it was to be a well-paid position, according to Doctor Patera. That was his colleague from the National Museum. How did he come by it? It was supposedly meant to be in Hitler’s astrological thing... Dad refused. I was there to put pressure that if he didn’t give in, they’d send me to be re-educated in Germany.”