Zdeněk Žemlička

“Why they kicked me out of the court? I was responsible for civil-rights affairs. A friend of mine was in charge of criminal-law proceedings. He told me: ‘I’ll probably not be back by tomorrow, I have two small cases tomorrow, could you please jump in for me?’ I told him: ‘leave the files on the table, I’ll not even bother to read through it, somebody probably stole something somewhere. Two or three days should do’. It had to do with some Mr. Zelenka or Zelený. I asked him if he had been convicted. He said no. Well, I had his criminal record where you can see everything he did, his entire past. I asked him if he had ever been in Slovakia. He said he had never been there. From his record, I could see that he had been convicted in Slovakia. He had been sentenced to two years on probation. ‘So you’ve never been to Slovakia?’ ‘No, never’. ‘You’ve never been in Slovakia?’ ‘Maybe you got into a fight there with somebody in a tavern?’ ‘No!’ I said to myself: ‘I’ll teach you not to lie!’ I sentenced him to three days on probation as I was mad at him for lying to me. I was a young guy back then. It was a mistake. The next day when I came to work, I saw a notice: ‘Action committee – leave your office immediately!’ I went to see the president of the court in Písek, PhD Pyska. He told me: ‘well, Mr. Žemlička, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs’.”

“Another story is about my uncle. He left me a leather box that was full of bullets. These were bullets that he had removed from his patients in the days when he worked as a military surgeon. He collected all these bullets and kept them in his box which he then passed on me. He was with the army and treated the wounded soldiers. The dead were put to one side, the wounded but still living on the other side. And he treated the wounded, mostly removing their tattered legs with a saw. Every doctor in the army specialized in something and my uncle specialized in sawing off legs. I once asked him how he did it, whether the patients were given any pain killers. He would just laugh and told me: ‘Good boy, there was nothing like that back in the days. They were given a few sips of liquor, two soldiers would hold him tight, two more would hold his legs and…’ I still remember hearing him saying this, as if it was today. ‘Anesthesia, on the front line, you’ve got to be kidding me, there was nothing like that there. I pulled up his pants and started sawing. And when I was finished, I started anew with another man’s leg. And here you are, keep this suitcase. It’s full with shrapnel. Russian shrapnel, German shrapnel, French shrapnel… I pulled all of this out of people. And I’m not kidding you’. There was no point in kidding a little boy. I later would see some of those who had survived this. The amputees. The state would give them these wooden prostheses, a wooden leg, and a newsstand and that was it. There was no reward, no compensation other than that. Or even worse, he was given a barrel organ and played and begged for money on the streets.”

“I still remember that my dad would accompany me to kindergarten. Even though I was still too small for kindergarten, they put me in Kindergarten as I was allegedly doing mischief at home. So my dad would take me to Kindergarten in the morning when he went to his work at the court on the square in Litomyšl. There was this little fenced off pond and as soon as my dad said goodbye I lay down and stayed there till he came back at noon. When he saw that I had been spending my day fishing in the pond instead of going to school, he went completely mad. I remember the hassle: ‘what are thinking! You’re all wet!’ I got beaten, yelled at and the next day it was the same thing over again. I just kept staying at the pond fishing till noon!”

“I was in Litomyšl in the national house. It was astonishing, a brand new building, almost like the national theater. It is still there today, survived the changing times. And in that building they staged the ceremony to celebrate the Kaiser. The ceremony was supposed to be initiated by the smallest pupil, which was accidentally me. Alright, my dad was the district judge in Litomyšl, so there might have been a certain measure of helpful connections that made it happen, this has always been like that. And I began to recite: ‘It’s already been 67 years/since our Kaiser took up his reign/still in full blossom like a young tree/he’ll stay here with us forever’. But he was already gone by next year. My schoolmates would afterwards mock me: ‘but you said he’d stay here with us forever. But he didn’t’. He passed away in 1916.”