Tomáš Lang

"Because that kind of latent anti-Semitism, or simply showing that you are something different, was also common at the gymnasium. I had an enormous, enormous problem one time in that grammar school when my father had to go to the school inspectorate - there was a district school inspectorate at the District National Committee at that time - to protest and to demand a solution because, it's not a self-praise, I was an excellent pupil all the way through the line. Not as eminent as my later wife, but I was eminent. And what goes with that, I was not that good at physical education. And the PE teacher, who was a displaced Slovak from Békéscsaba, whom I recently found on the list of names of the displaced people who came in that population exchange, scolded me with words like, 'You're just for learning, not for exercising." Well, I'll translate it into plain language, who is this you, because he was using the plural form of you. So it must have been something more. And I already knew who the you were that he was singling out and saying they were for learning but not for gymnastics. Come on, I couldn't skip meter forty. And it was a stretch at the school inspectorate. This gentleman, his name was Jan Krasko, was invited. What they told him, I don't know. He didn't reproach me afterwards, but he didn't forgive me for anything. So if he could, he would have had me flunked out of gym class too."

"Around that lake on one side is the town of Ravensbrück, on the other side is the concentration camp that the Nazis built as the first specialised concentration camp for women. I stayed there after a long journey. 'I'm not going there today, I'm going there tomorrow, I've got to prepare for that.' And when I look out of that little hotel at that water and I see that there it is. I knew by the map that I was supposed to go there. I had all kinds of feelings and the next morning I went to the other side of that lake. And there I see: administrative building, accommodation, outdoor such pavilions for accommodation. Then it dawned on me, when I was there, that there were SS men living there, and then for 40 years there were former officers of the Soviet army living there. I turned around, looking back. At the city. And I didn't have the mental strength to enter that camp. Not that I got there, knock, shake, ring the bell, and here I am. No. It affects a person tremendously deeply and emotionally. And on the bank under the trees there were such resting benches. I sat down on one of those benches, I remained seated there for about two hours and contemplated the fact that here, behind my back, has been a camp since '34. Right when Dachau was established, at the same time Ravensbrück was established as a women's only camp. And there's a small town, quite decent people are there, lived there, their ancestors lived there. With what feelings those people could live here, there in that town, when they knew on this other bank what was going on. Because there was a women's camp and there was a youth camp adjacent quite close to it - especially, for the youth, a children's camp. An inhumane insane thing. Sort of just an absolute collapse of humanism, which was all realised there. I couldn't decipher this riddle. After two hours I was like, 'I'm going to go find out,' so I stayed there for about three days."