Marta Sandtnerová

* 1929

  • "And then we were at the sea and swam there and it was beautiful. And then we came home and our housekeeper told us, that there were Russians here. And from that point on he always had an ear on the radio. And they closed the border and we were telling ourselves: 'We are going to be emigrants, in Bulgaria...' Because no-one knew, when they would open the border again. And so we stayed there about a week longer, and when we were going back by train, the Bulgarian army was riding toward us and Blanka spat at them from the window as the trains were passing each other. And so we came to Prague... Yeah, we arrived in Slovakia and I quickly went to buy some bread, because that is what is imprinted on a person from the year forty-five, that when mother was alone, now bread, if there was food at all, and so I ran to buy some bread. And so we rode the train and arrived here and martial law was declared. So it was after the ninth hour and nobody could walk anywhere and we were at the train station. There weren't any taxis anywhere. And so then our clever fellow citizens made themselves some good deals there, that occasionally someone would come with a car and load someone up. And so we caught some car there and it drove us here. And here, when we were driving over this shrapnel, then there stood lots of tanks against us..."

  • "And so here in one villa there lived this engineer, this kind of handsome man, and he was a Russian. He had a Russian wife and they lived here, and once they came and so on, then they grabbed him and took him away to Siberia. Because he was a White Guard, well those were those runaway Russians, when the revolution started there, they were running to Paris and here and anywhere outside of Russia. And he started a life here, lived here in peace, and those Russians came, and the next day, and the third day... They had to have been amazingly well-informed, where everyone was and what was here... He disappeared. And then he returned, after twenty years, or I don't know how long. And his wife lived here with his daughter and I later talked with that daughter and I asked her, how he was doing, when he returned. And she said that he was completely devastated and in the end I think that he committed suicide... That he couldn't bear it apparently. They were somewhere in those Gulags, somewhere in Siberia."

  • "And here there marched in this rude little man, who started to give out orders to everyone and immediately wanted some vodka. Well and my father's family, we didn't have anything, and we told him, that we can only offer him some water, that we don't have any alcohol here. And he wanted to start living here and was extremely rude, and so father handled him very courteously, but in the end he shouted: 'March!' at him. And he got scared and immediately left. And so we could see, that we had to be hard on them. And then some colonel came, who had his breasts full with military awards and him I sang The Lark's Song from Hubička and he bowed to me, hand on his heart, and was also trying to mediate some accommodations here. And so in the end we negotiated that, since I was a young girl, that they would put some women here, I mean female soldiers. And so some officer and her assistant came here, a girl that was younger than her, both extremely sad, these girls. Mother made them breakfast and they didn't eat it, because we apparently, as the bourgeois, want to poison them..."

  • "Those villas were usually Jewish, and so when those catastrophes happened with the Germans, then those people here either still managed to go somewhere out of the country, or some jumped out of their windows or shot themselves and so on. Because the Jewish families here were all rich families, there was one tragedy after another here. Well and even this villa that grandpa had built himself because of the atelier, so that he would have space for Palacký's memorial stone, so I guess actually right beside it, now it's a villa, that belongs to the government representatives. It was reconstructed in the year 1925, sometime, when mother was getting married and her brother was getting married as well, then this villa had to be divided into two apartments. And so that they would have enough money for the reconstruction, then before, because uncle was an architect, he first reconstructed the atelier for the villa, which later... And that money, which they gained from it, they invested here into this reconstruction. And that villa beside it was bought by a Jewish family, then later by doctor Somrněc; he was an advocate, I think. He had a wife and a son and fortunately that doctor died still before all those tragedies happened, and his wife and son went to a concentration camp and it was then taken by the Germans. Some obergruppenführer lived there, a very high rank. Because specifically here the villas were usually Jewish, this later became the German part of the city. All the way to Stromovka the villas were... Here around the corner lived Frank and various German families."

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Communism took almost everything away from us

Marta Sandtnerová
Marta Sandtnerová
zdroj: archív pamětnice

Marta Sandtnerová was born on the 6th of March 1929 in Prague. She is the granddaughter of Stanislav Sucharda, one of the most prominent Czech sculptors and the author of František Palacký‘s memorial in Prague, among others. She spent her whole life in an Art Nouveau villa, which was built by her grandfather according to the design of one of the founders of modern Czech architecture, Jan Kotěra, in the Prague quarter of Bubeneč. Marta‘s parents were Julius Sandtner, a lawyer and a minister‘s assistant at the Ministry of Social Care, and Marta Sandtnerová, the daughter of Stanislav Sucharda, who like her father studied sculpting. Great general artistic talent was also discovered in their firstborn daughter Marta from a very young age. During the war she studied at a grammar school, but immediately after the liberation she started attending a music school in Prague, where she graduated from classical singing. During her childhood and adolescence she became witness to several major changes in the quarter of Bubeneč, which were closely tied to the major events of modern Czechoslovak history. Those who considered themselves the elite at the time always sought to live in the grandiose villas of one of the most prestigious quarters in Prague. Marta remembers the original, mostly Jewish inhabitants of the Bubeneč villas, their escape to foreign countries from the coming of the Nazis, or being sent to the concentration camps, from which none of them ever came back. She remembers how then the Nazi higher-ups in the Protectorate would move into the villas, how they were replaced by Red Army soldiers at the end of the war, and after February 1948 by the chosen from among the ranks of the Communists. She even remembers the Prague Uprising, the coming of the Red Army, and also the post-war events, like the bloody revenge of the Czechs for the occupation, or the kidnappings of „white“ Russian emigrants by agents of the Soviet secret service Směrš. Her memories also concern the changes of the Communists‘ seizure of power and the following years, including the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968. Marta began her artistic career in the year 1954 in the operatic choir of the National Theater, which she only for her pension after twenty-eight years. Sucharda‘s villa, thanks to its lower living area, barely escaped nationalization and was left in its original state as the family‘s property. In the year 2008 she founded the Foundation of the Museum of Stanislav Sucharda together with her brother Jan, at the initiative of his wife Blanka. Its goal was to care for the works and artistic heritage of their grandfather and his descendants.