academic painter Ivan Bukovský

„My granny from my mother´s side, at least what emerged from occasional remarks of my mother, was a Communist Party MP during the First Republic, and so it happened that later on, when she was a little girl, the quite infamous minister Kopecký used to hold her on his lap. They knew each other rather well. He became my father´s boss after the war, because my father was employed at the Press Department of the Ministry of the Information and Education (TOMI) and thus minister Kopecký was his supreme boss at the time. And when they said to my father: “Otíčku, you´re a good comrade but as a Jew you simply can´t work here“, my mother, at least according to what she told us, ran to Kopecký to scratch his eyes out and scold him off. She regarded him as an uncle or something like that. She remembered him from her childhood. But that is only another small detail. In fact, I don´t know much about the earlier history of my parents because they didn´t like to speak about such things. That´s why it was only much later that I started to put things together from small fragments and accidental remarks which I remembered.“

„And my father was also under interrogation procedure in connection with the interrogation prior to the Proces. Simply, he suddenly disappeared for three days and was no more. He returned after three days, completely exhausted: “Marianna, make me strong coffee, I´m going to bed.“ And much later, he put interesting cards on the table. One more thing has to be said about this that one of the reasons why he was interrogated could have been the fact that one of the brothers Slánskýs, no idea now if it was Richard or Rudolf, was a witness at my parents´ wedding. This could be the reason why he was in the focus of attention and Hermann Field on top of that, so it stood to reason that he had been interrogated. And my father, when I was a bit older and was able to understand, told me something important. That they, of course, asked him what language he communicated in with Field because they found out that he had decent German but no English. And Field could speak only English. And my father, an experienced concentration camp detainee, knew that, while being interrogated, you answer the questions in the way they were asked. So, he answered simply that he had spoken to Field through an interpreter. Luckily, they didn´t ask him who the interpreter was. Because if they had, he would have had to reply that it had been my mother and I would probably have become an orphan in my tender age. But as I say, my father luckily knew how to answer and got away with it only with the three days of interrogation. But I think that already at this time, his ideology was undermined, maybe not his ideology yet but the belief in the representatives of the ideology. Because in the second half of the 60s when we were having wise discussions as I was becoming old enough to understand, he told me:“Don´t you ever dare enter the Party! They are no communists but a gang of criminals.“ And my feeling is, because he died in 1970 that what happened in 1968 in August that this, in fact, killed him. He was ill, naturally his health was poor already because of the concentration camp, yet he still kept his head above water but this damaged him healthwise and mentally completely so that in October 1970 he died.“