Jindřiška Radová

“When Czechoslovakia became occupied by Russians, Pravoslav and I had a large exhibition in Munich. We slept in a hotel there and while we were eating breakfast, the waiters came to us and expressed their sympathy for us. We did not know what was happening. Then we were told that Russians had taken over our country at night. We were in Germany. Šárka was in Moscow, on some excursion with the Academy of Arts in Prague. We thus learnt about this and then there was the opening of the exhibition and we were standing there and crying and our eyes were red during the opening ceremony! We kept crying. What is going to happen? Pravoslav is on a blacklist, and when we go back to the border, will they arrest him? And what’s going on with our apartment in Prague? Well, we were absolutely desperate.”

“Then it was quite tragic for us, because father was involved in some resistance activity and people who were also involved in it began to be arrested. Certain Mr. Udržal shot himself, the wine shop owner Bálek was arrested and father shot himself in order to save the others. But the family absolutely did not know why; it all became revealed only after the war. We had no idea why father shot himself. I remember that I was sitting in the kitchen in the evening and father was sitting opposite me, and I was showing him what kind of dress I would like for my dancing lessons. And then it happened before the following morning. I was thus the last to see him.”

“[Artists who were officially approved during the communist regime] …half of them left, and half of them made their way out of it. Since they knew the situation, they got access to various positions. Artists lost everything. We had a kind of a fund. We had to give some of the money we earned from every work of art to the fund, and when we needed money for some future project, for example, we could borrow money from that fund. That was amazing. The money from fund was then somehow drained away. Nobody knows how it happened…!”