Karel Freund

“Do you know what stolpersteins are? Certain German artist invented them a few years ago. Stolpersteins are small brass cubes which are installed in places from which some people came or from where they left for concentration camps. It began in Germany. Here in Prague they started doing it about two or three years ago. The Jewish Community or some organization which cooperates with them handles it. We were in Modřany with Vráťa (my son) and some other people about two years ago and we placed a stolperstein there. What was interesting was that an older lady who was in the garden there came to see it and she asked us what we were doing there. We had rung the bell to tell her about it, but it took her some time before she came and the it was already in progress before she got there. We explained what we were doing and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, my Grandma had lived here and I have heard about it from her.’ She knew something about the family of my father, and by coincidence, her parents had lived in somewhere in Smíchov. (I guess the older members of the family were living there in Modřany), and they had let my father a garden house in Smíchov where they lived. And by coincidence – or rather, not coincidence, but it just happened like that – those people had even lived somewhere in Smíchov, and he was imprisoned for a long time in relation to the assassination of Heidrich, or, perhaps, he even died in prison, but I don’t remember precisely and I don’t want to make things up. The lady promised that she would have her husband contact me later, because he knew a lot more about it, but he eventually didn’t contact me. But it does not matter; I have not visited the place since that time, either.”

“He was an idiot; he taught history and he was the school principal at that time. He was kind of reserved and he did not want to discuss anything with us. Once we heard that our English teacher Věra had displayed a photo of Mao Zedong in her office, which she shared with some other teachers, and in 1966 this could get her right in the shit. They found out about it and what we then did – the six or seven of us classmates – was that we got the idea to obtain photos of Mao and display them on our chests in protest. This principal was absolutely unnerved by it and he started telling us some nonsense because he did not get it at all. The principal’s deputy, who understood it immediately, then came there and told us: ‘You know, boys, take those pictures off, they really don’t go too well with your clothes’ or something like that. He simply told us: ‘Stop doing that.’ And everything was fine. We liked the deputy quite a lot, and we were happy that it turned out that way, and he was happy, too, and everyone was happy. The principal was totally enraged and he behaved like and he was acting crazy and threatening that he would have us expelled from school or what not… Only many years later I learnt from my mom – because this principal’s wife worked with my mom, and she was then telling her colleagues about it during one of their meetings in a café – that she was laughing so hard about it and she remarked: ‘It was so funny, they did it well! My Tonda is such an idiot.’ That was because when they had been expecting a baby some time in the 1950s, her husband Tonda had suggested to her that the baby boy ought to be named Mao. This idiot the principal thus thought that I had learnt about it from my mother, and therefore he was so mad. I realized it only ten years later when my mom told me about it. Incredible.”

“I thus went to Litoměřice to do my two-year army service, but at the same time I was still in the application process for university study of special education. Meanwhile I received the invitation for the interview and so I notified them about my situation and asked for another date of the interview and they replied that it would be no problem. I was undergoing the introductory army training at that time and I was not able to leave. In September the university sent me another invitation for the interview, but we had to go for some military exercise at the same time. I have never done anything like that in my life, and our battalion’s commander... (only later I learnt from Vráťa Brabenec that he was a printer from Počernice, an alcoholic, who ran away from his job and got himself drafted in the army in the 1950s. I was telling Vráťa about him and he said: ‘Yeah, Mydlář, I know him, he has three sisters, and so on…’ I was on bad terms with this battalion commander from the very beginning. When they were giving us the ‘welcome’ in the army, he yelled at us (he loved yelling) and he introduced himself ‘My name is major Mydlář’ and two or three of us guys burst into laughter as he said it and we had problems since then. He always liked to say that the kind of guys like us could shit above their heads but their shit would not fall down on our heads or something like that. When we had to go to the exercise to Doupov, I decided that I would pretend to be sick. I went to the army doctor and I pretended that I was in pain as if I had appendicitis. The doctor was quite understanding and so I told him the truth and he let me stay there and when the rest of the soldiers went for the exercise to Doupov, I went to Prague for the interview. The interview was held in Brandýs, and I passed. They notified me in a letter that I had passed, but the commander stole the letter. He was pissed off because he realized that I had cheated him and when I was finishing the army service about a year or year and a half later, he just waved this letter in front of my face. So that’s the way it was.”