Miloš Petera

"I was summoned to explain my paintings I planned to exhibit in the Orlická Gallery in Rychnov. I was asked to come to the regional office. So I went there, but I looked very provocative, because I was dressed all in black, which is fashionable nowadays, but it wasn't then in 1963 or '64. I had an English black umbrella and a black beard, which was wrong then. So I presented myself at the reception, where there was a militiaman, and he eyed me suspiciously for a long time to see what I wanted. I said that I was invited to see Comrade Šilutek, and he said, 'Well, wait, comrade, I'll ask.' He called him up and was told that he couldn't see me right away, that I had to wait. The militiaman told me to go and sit in the park because I didn't look at all suitable to sit in the hallway. So I sat down in the park but they didn't like that either, they said it was a provocation that I was sitting in front of the roses with a black umbrella, dressed in black in front of the office. They found it horrible too, and after a while they called me in and he had these photographs in front of him - my burnt pellets and the required things, structural sands and wood and things like that. He was unhappy about it and said, 'Comrade, why are you doing this to me? What is this?! What will the working class say to that? This is horrible!'"

"We needed a singer. But no one knew English lyrics to swing back then. So we put out a sort of audition but we couldn't find anyone for a long time. Suddenly a beautiful girl came in, blonde hair halfway down her back. She knew the English lyrics and she sang absolutely fantastic. We took her on straight away, of course. It was Eva Bojanovská, who was then at the Brno Business Academy, I think. She became famous later as Eva Pilarová. We used to have rehearsals of our band every Wednesday afternoon at the International Variety Theatre Rozmarýn, I think it's still there today. We didn't rehearse in the main hall, but upstairs in the offices where the boxes were. Once, we were rehearsing and after a while this inconspicuous gentleman came in and listened. And we played hits like O Cangaceiro with those rumba balls or Třešňový květ (Cherry Blossom) with that trumpet solo, it's still played today. And this inconspicuous gentleman was standing back there in the dark listening to us and then he took Eva away from us! It was Erik Knirsch, the chief conductor of the Czech Radio in Brno, and that's how Eva started her career."

"The Netík family lived upstairs in the Sochor colony. Their son, Václav Netík, fled abroad via Poland in 1939. He found his way to England, became a pilot in the RAF and flew in the Wellington bomber as a crew member to bomb German cities. In one raid on Essen he was shot down and killed, he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. It was a family of patriots and his father, knowing that his son had died in that combat flight in forty-one or forty-two, went with a group of patriots to attack those Hitler Youth on May 5th. They wanted to get into the building from back, but the fanatics figured out that somebody was coming at them from behind, and Mr. Netík got shot in the legs with a machine gun. I was peeking through the slit of the closed curtains. My mother said that during the revolution the curtains had to be closed so that no one could see inside. I saw two men walking on the other side of the road wearing white armbands with a red cross on them. They were carrying a stretcher that was covered with a white sheet, and there were big blood stains on the sheet. It was Mr. Netík, the father of the son who was shot down over the Germany."

"It was wartime and there were Wehrmacht soldiers, SS, Hitler Youth, all around me at that time. My first drawing attempts in my sketchbook were Wehrmacht weapon badges and I had almost all of them except one, and that was the Luftwaffe. So I was unhappy that I didn't have the Luftwaffe. I went to the cinema with my mother. There in the lobby of that cinema was a German Luftwaffe lieutenant, and I broke free from my mother and went to look closely at the lieutenant's belt. It was rather embarrassing in front of the other Czechs that a Czech child rushed to the German officer, so my mother grabbed my hand and pulled me back. However, the German officer scolded her that if a Czech boy was interested in a German soldier, she shouldn't pull him away like that."