Pavla Jerusalemová

“When we came to Paris, all three of us stayed at my father’s friend, who had a pretty big flat. When [the Munich Agreement] took place... our friend didn’t have radio at all, and he didn’t care about the news. So we went to some other friends and listened to Hitler’s speech. And by the time we said goodbye to our friends and went down on to the street, the paperboys were selling newspapers with his speech all translated and printed out. People fought to buy a copy. Hitler spoke Germans, but everyone in Paris could read his speech that very evening. Hitler said: ‘There will be no war, I want the Sudetes, which are populated by Germans who themselves ask to join me.’ Daladier and all the four powers that were there, they agreed to it. They were glad that they could leave Munich without any war.”

“People from World War I kept speaking of the war. How awful it was and so on. But no one spoke of World War II much. Or the concentration camps. People were afraid to speak a word of it. That was a big change from the conversations and debates about World War I. At the time they thought how dreadful it had been, and yet... People don’t like remembering horrid things.”

“It began in 1948. That was the coup. Group 42 met for the last time at the café on Na Příkopech Street. I came there with Honza [Jan Kotík]. The papers at the time published that Russian musicians had acknowledged that they should change the way they compose because it’s true that the common worker should understand it. And that Socialist Realism is correct. Gross spoke in that way especially, he said: ‘From now on I will paint in such a way that the common worker will understand it.’ Only Chalupecký, Jiří Kolář and Jan Kotík said: ‘That’s none of my business, I paint what I want to paint and not what someone tells me to paint.’ Back then they had big discussions about it. A lot of people caved in, changed.”

“I found out that up where Ječná Street begins, there’s a company that delivers soda and beer - drinks in general - to Terezín every day. So I went there. There was a doctor there who gave everyone who wanted to go to Terezín a typhus injection. Because they had typhus in Terezín. So I rode there in a lorry, we sat on top of the crates. There was a gatekeeper in Terezín, he’d stayed there because people kept asking where to find this and that prisoner. I found my father there. He was lying in bed in pyjamas. The days were quite warm at the time. There were lots of starved people lying on the grass outside, they gave me quite a fright. So we set off home again. I’d taken a blanket with me to wrap my father in. And the driver took us right in front of our house.”

“Baťa owned the whole city of Zlín. He owned the cinema, the schools, the shopping centre, everything - even the railway. He had a private railway line. When you travelled from Prague to Zlín, you had to either switch trains or take a sleeper, which they would then detach and re-attach to the Baťa train. Henry Ford visited Zlín once. He had heard how brilliantly it was organised. And he said: ‘We don’t have it this organised back in America.’ The people who worked weren’t called shoemakers or what, according to their job. They were called ‘Baťites’. Those were completely different people. They were so organised and everything ran so smoothly that everyone was amazed that it was possible.”

“It was the same with my father - he was independent, but as a Jew he didn’t want to have the sign: Jewish shop. So my husband took over the shop, and it displayed his name: Businessman Jan Kotík. And towards the end of the war, that was in January, the Gestapo made a sudden appearance. Because they’d received information from some tax adviser that Jan Kotík knows nothing about accounting, that he doesn’t do anything in the shop. That he’s a painter, that he paints pictures. So the Gestapo came from Berlin, they took everything they could take. Not the furniture, but the machines and all the supplies we had. They closed our bank account. Basically, they did everything they could do.”