Miroslav Kalaš

"I am afraid that when the young people of today hear this, they will consider me not [exactly] a person with a refined mind. Our President with his assistants, [that] is quite different from President [Edvard] Beneš, whom I met personally. There was a time in the First Republic when Sunday afternoon was a reason for citizens to go to Prague Castle to see the monuments that radiate our history, [such as] the open St. Vitus Cathedral, and not to go to the cottages. We were also walking up the castle steps with my mom and dad on a beautiful sunny afternoon and my mom pointed out to me, 'There goes the President and Mrs. President, so say hello!' And so when [the] President approached [us], I leaned in and actually said hello in a way that the President noticed. I note that the President [Edvard Beneš] walked like a normal citizen. Mrs. President, Hana Benešová, was hooked into him. They were dressed like normal citizens - Mr. President in a beautiful light suit [and] Mrs. [President] had a charming dress, which impressed me even as a little boy. After my vehement greeting, they stopped by us, Mr. President caressed me, Mrs. President caressed me. And Mr. President stopped by with my father. What the meeting was like and what Mr. President and my father wanted, I didn't find out until I started to come to my senses. Mr. President [supposedly] asked my father where he worked, if he liked his job, if his salary was enough to support his family and [things like that]. Today's mocipan in the Castle calls it sucking knowledge from the people. So it was sucking from the people."

"The hatred towards the German population was terrible. I experienced [it] myself when we built a barricade at a large intersection called Na Vinici, where two roads [lead] up [and] down from the Prague Crematorium and then it goes on down Černokostelecká Street, perpendicular to that is [the street] Starostrašnická Street and right next to it is the carriage house. Opposite on the corner was the apotheke, a large pharmacy that supplied almost the whole of Strašnice. And there was a barricade in front of it. That is, the paving stones were being pulled up and the trammen pulled out the trams and pushed them up to the crematorium. There they filled them with paving stones and let them down, [where] the tracks were blocked with more [paving] stones. At [that point] the trams, as they were running, overturned. No tank crossed that. And before the cobbles were pulled up there - we did that, I did that - [there] was a little bit of that May rain. So [when] we pulled the cobbles out, [there was] this depression with this sandy subsoil underneath. I remember it exactly, [because] I put my whole face in the water like that, because bullets from the villas were flying above me. It was a row of villas that [stood] on the Vineyard, which was a kind of hillside, and from the villas above they were shooting at us with some kind of machine gun or submachine gun. Later we learned that they were two old ladies whose son or grandson had been in the German army and still had some armament [hidden] there. And they, in their Nazi enthusiasm, just reached out and started shooting at us. They didn't hit anybody, but immediately a solution was called for. Our people captured a German tank, drove it up to the villa, and shot out the window with the two babas."

"A very respectable-looking gentleman in a long coat came in and told my father in German - in those days the tram drivers had to speak German - that he was giving him money and that he wanted to intern him. And because there was an awful lot of money, my father took off his hat. I know that the cap was [suddenly] full of [stacked] banknotes. Then it was found that [together it amounted to] a million marks. So my father said that he was going with the prisoner - he was actually already secured - to the old school where I went. There was a collection center for Germans there. But - and this is the strongest experience of the Prague Revolution - the crowd took this man away from my father and started to take [their] hatred of Germans out on him. I know it was bad... But it was horrible, and for a twelve-year-old boy, not yet thirteen, it was an experience that I can still paint part by part. This nasty bitch with a tube with textiles wound on it and sold, so she started beating the guy over the head with the paper tube. The second experience was [when] then [a] gentleman started stabbing him in the back with a pocketknife. He had a really curious reason [for doing this]. Because he lived across the street from us and he had this curious woman who - even though she had been warned that there was shooting outside - came out in front of the entrance [to] the house to have a look. And just as she came out, she apparently got hit by a stray bullet, but it was probably from our revolutionary guard, if I may put it that way… just next to the delight of that man, in the groin. The man pulled her back, and nothing happened to her. It wasn’t fatal. That man was taking revenge in this way. So much hatred was unleashed there by people who had stayed home throughout the war... [I know this] because I knew them, most of them. And they beat that man until he fell. They completely sidelined my dad. And then I saw two of them grab him, one by each leg, and drag him, [as] his coat rolled up and they dragged him on the stone pavement [on] his bare back. Soon, he was leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then they stopped, lifted him up, he swayed and fell again. No, I cannot remember the Czechs fondly…"

"Emigrants came to us from Russia, fleeing the 'conveniences' of the Great October Revolution. And they came to Prague at that time, [which] enchanted them, [so they] stayed right on [its] edge. There were forty-six parties in our house. It was a newly built corner house, and we had about six Russian partisans in it. And they were excellent people. I have [just] since then divided Russian society into Russians and "Russkies". Russians, they were the ones we lived with. These were the people who were reserved... I didn't understand at the time why they were so self-centered and why they didn't want to open up to our society. They only interacted with my mother, who was extremely kind [to them]. They recognized that, so they communicated with her, but otherwise they [and others] greeted politely. They just didn't communicate [with anyone else] and it was only later that I understood why. I'll skip [now in time]. When the German occupation ended, these were already our citizens. And I would blame President Beneš for issuing lists of these Russian citizens. And they were disappearing... For example, two families disappeared overnight. The next day we didn't see them again, we didn't meet them. Until they all disappeared. It was a disgusting mechanism. Until [then] in high school I had a classmate who was one of them. We didn't meet until after the Velvet Revolution, and we still meet [since] graduation, I don't know how many times. I said to him, 'Nikolai, how is it possible that you stayed here?' And he [told me], 'I can tell you today. These were the commissions before which every single Czechoslovak citizen of Russian nationality had to appear. And my dad came before that commission and suddenly the chairman of the commission [started] sucking up to him. They [found] that they were actually classmates from the same village. So [suddenly] the questioning stopped, along with the identification of those matters necessary for eviction. He was the one who didn't even know that [it was] about eviction. They started talking outside the committee as two classmates and he told him: "There's a door behind me. You open that door and close it from the other side. And then you're going to run and run and run." And that's how we stayed.'"