„And of course, in the 1950s my father was excommunicated, so to say. First as a son of a tradesman, second as a soldier fighting in the Western Army and third for being a Jew. All kinds of things happened – and it isn´t a well-known historical fact – that when the events in 1956 in Hungary began (no contrarevolution, of course), so here, Czech, Czechoslovak comrades were frightened that the revolution could happen here as well. And there had to have been a list of suspicious people made up ahead of time. Only a few days, in fact a few hours after the situation in Hungary gradually increased, the people that the comrades were potentially afraid of were arrested on purpose – I could check for myself in Zábřeh later on. Naturally, it was the middle class, the former tradesmen that were hurt the most. So, one evening the State Police appeared at our place and took both of my parents away. Later, we learned they had spent a week in custody in the Olomouc prison. My mother begged the police, I was still a little boy, to allow her to hand me over to my grandmother’s. They didn´t allow this. I stayed in the house alone until some of the good neighbours went to inform my grandmother at the other end of the town that my parents had been taken away and I had been there alone. My grandmother came for me and tried in vain to find out where her daughter and her son- in-law were.“
„So, in this nation there was and is a significantly large group of people that had nothing to justify or apologize for. They have always been standing at the right place. I know this again from my father who knew a legionary, or better said, one of his real friends had a father who was a legionary. As a number of the likes of Pavel Kohout would say: ‘We were partly mistaken and partly were too young and naive and we didn´t know..’ How come they didn´t know and in Zábřeh people knew from a legionary, only one legionary, what an incredible, and I´ll use a polite word – mess – there had been in Russia and how the Bolshevik Revolution had happened and what atrocities had taken place afterwards during the Civil War on the side of the bolsheviks and similar things. So, again this is an excuse, an excuse created on purpose by a certain group of people who use this to say that they didn´t have information and had nowhere to obtain it.“
“Well, and later I learned, which was not surprising at all, that when there was a process with Dr. Horáková, my grandmother turned to her neighbours and initiated a petition for clemency that they signed and she sent away to some official address. In the petition she, as a mother of a minor daughter, asked for clemency for Dr. Horáková. I managed to ask her about this and this is what she replied: ‘You know, it wasn´t such a big deal, all this. These women were sensible and had brains in their heads, they knew what had happened and what was happening.’ And then she added one important word. She said: ‘They were decent women.’ And since then I have realized that the early stage, if not the first step before the great personal courage, is when a person is decent. And I say to myself that if in the decisive moments people had been decent, which is not so little to ask, a number of these things wouldn´t have had to be so terrible as they had been.“
Pavel Taussig was born on 2nd July 1949 in Olomouc, yet his childhood and youth were spent in Zábřeh, Moravia. His father managed to escape to Palestine in time, entered the British Army to actively fight the Nazis. Back in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, he was arrested for political reasons and was persecuted. Since completing his studies, Pavel has been working in the field of film history, particularly that of the Czechoslovak pre-war film. He wrote over 10 books, was the author or co-author of TV film documentaries, and has written numerous articles as well as the story for the Oscar winning film “Kolja.” Pavel Taussig died on August 24th, 2023.
