Josef Vávra

"My dad, I am learning about him a lot now when people are talking to me, he did a lot for the strangers, not for our family, but for the strangers whom he helped, whom he transferred, he was completely one hundred percent involved. And the family actually, we just suffered. Today, we can say, the result of it is, that he did a lot for people, for strangers, but for his own family he did not have enough. So, it kind of pays off on the family. I was also sorry that he didn't take me as a son, that the feeling wasn't there, I was feeling it. Then, I explained it to myself again. If you just don't live with the child, you're not in that contact, so that feeling doesn't form remotely. That's not it. That's about life, everything."

“When I was still very little, we went to visit my grandmother at Pankrác, and already in the train people helped us with various things, and they even accompanied us to Pankrác. I went with my aunt, she was twelve or thirteen, she was my mother’s sister. We got up in the morning and walked about two hours to the train station in Husinec. Back then it wasn’t like it is nowadays, that you’ve got transport everywhere. Back then you walked everywhere, it was winter, and the snow was deep. I don’t remember much of the prison, only some hazy images of meeting with Grandma. That was my first memory in connection with prisons. My aunt was still little then, a child taking a child. That’s how it was back then, you forget that over time, actually. It’s getting better now, in my old age.”

"Does it matter to you today that you've had the life that complicated?" - " It happens to me sometimes when a person is at the bottom, so he wonders why did it have to be that way? It goes into a person's head unnecessarily, so it somehow cloudes the mind and it's not right. It is better if one has the head clear, with better experiences. It shows now when a person is older, I didn't have it before. As long as one lives a normal life, family life, and one is younger, there is some fun. You don't have the fun like that today; it is just talks from time to time. These thoughts come to an old man. It's not until certain years, you have a clear head. As a person begins to age, then it starts. I don't know how it will go on to keep it at least like this. Now the grandchildren will make me a little happy, so I can have happier thoughts. If I just think about this, I will go crazy from what they say. But that's not possible, if a person wants to live a while further, then the head has to be cleared a bit somewhere. It depends on the human psyche."