professor PhDr., CSc. Jaro Křivohlavý

“There was a little wooden door inside the larger door, just big enough for one person. We used the little door when we walked through individually. Šimerka was running away from Pinďa (the commander of the Small Fortress, Jindřich Jöckl), he slipped through that little door and slammed that door behind him. It actually shut. But Pinďa wanted to kick him through the door, so his shoe stayed stuck in the little door. For those of us who were there, it was great fun, but Šimerka was lucky to have survived.”

“One of the inmates was ‘Zimmerkomandant’, the commander of the prison cell. Because the Germans would often ask different things, the Zimmerkomandant had to speak German very well. In our case, the commander of cell No. 26, where I spent the longest time, was Fabuš. His name was Fabián but we called him Fabuš. He came from Lounky and they speak a lot of German there, so he could speak very well German. I admired him because every time a German potentate entered the cell, he had to report to him. In his report, he had to account for the presence of every inmate. We were for instance sixty-seven inmates and so he would say: ‘Thirty-two of them in Lovosice, seventeen in Litoměřice, eight of them are here, another one there... He did have to mention every one of the inmates. But he reported brilliantly! As if he had been reading it from a paper.”

“It took quite a few years before it came through but eventually we started working on the International Standard Safety Colors and back then, most of them of course helped me. We met with various representatives of foreign states in different places of the world. The Russians were opposed to using red while Indians were opposed to the use of orange... Finally the standard was actually adopted worldwide. You can see the results basically everywhere, for example at the train station. You have employees in clothing with yellow marking, or in a stairwell, the first step is always marked in yellow, plus a great number of other markings on machines and equipment, safety signs for electricity, it all conforms to this Safety Colors standard.”

“My name is Jaro Křivohlavý. I have one more name, Borek, but I’m not using it. Originally, I was supposed to be called Borek Křivohlavý, but the clerk in the office said that it was not possible. Only names in the calendar could be given to the children. So my father took the calendar, it was on March 21 and there was in red letters: Jaro. ‘So he’ll be called Jaro’. That's how I got my name. I’m neither famous, nor moderate. I was born in Třebenice on March 19, 1925, on a Friday.”