"When on 9 May I left the house where me and my mother were hiding throughout the Prague Uprising for the first time, I saw a man hanging by his feet from a streetlamp in Verdunská street. He must have been slowly burned to death because his body was wrapped in a film. He was tortured sadistically and brutally! Some buffoon was jumping around him, waving his gun. In my thirteen years of age, this had left a fairly strong mark on me.”
“The Czechs have a deep-rooted automatic conviction about the integrity of their nation and its history, thus ignoring all negative aspects. They don’t realize that the Hussites’ ‘graceful tours’ were as feared as Boko Haram or Taliban are today, and that they had nothing to do with communion under both kinds but instead with looting, killing, raping and so on. Just the same, the Czechs loathe when someone claims that the Germans living on Czech territory were victims of injustice. I said a few sentences on the topic in front of my daughter and she burst into tears because it hurt her feelings. She probably considered me a renegade.”
“On Palm Sunday me and my friends went to Barrandov where from a meadow we could see silver airplanes and white clouds of smoke in the distance. It seemed almost as a fairytale scene, we could hear nothing and didn’t realize that hundreds of people were dying in front of our eyes. We hadn’t stayed at the meadow for long because some German came out of a house and dragged us to his place so that we didn’t get hit by a shrapnel. We were dumbfounded by what we saw inside – the interior of the house was decorated with Nazi pennants and insignia. It was unbelievable. As late as in March 1945 some people believed that Hitler would pull out some special weapon which would enable him to reverse the process leading to Germany’s defeat. It really was a strange feeling.”
Miloš Pokorný was born on 22 December 1931 in Prague. While at high school he was interested in English literature but due to political circumstances he decided not to apply to university. Instead, he found a job at the foreign trade enterprise Feromet and later transferred to the Research Institute of Heavy Industry. Following a military service with the 5th Auxiliary Technical Battalion he got employed by the Artia publishing house which he then represented for eight years in negotiations with foreign partners. Faced with growing pressure by the secret police, in 1962 he hadn‘t returned from a business trip to London and for reasons of safety went under the name of Martin Heller ever since. In Great Britain he soon found a job with the media tycoon Robert Maxwell. Since 1965 he worked at the British Printing Corporation and five years later he established his own publishing house Orbis. For many years he successfully promoted Czech scientists and artists on the international scene, publishing their books in hundreds of thousands of copies. He established a particularly close collaboration with the photographer Werner Forman; his second wife Barbara Hellerová has since 1978 managed Forman‘s photo archive. Miloš Pokorný‘s last finished publication which reflected his interest in arts as well as a thorough study of Czech history is the epic Prague Castle: Crossroads of History, published in 2014. The same year his younger daughter Margot Hellerová was awarded the Order of the British Empire for serving the art scene and involving the public in the South London Gallery over which she presides. Miloš Pokorný passed away on 15 October 2016 in London.
