Miroslav Mlynář

"So, I came there and I really thought it was a misunderstanding. I sat there and with such a mild humor I was saying: 'So what do you have on me, what's going on, what's happened? We have an exhibition ready and now I got a message like that.' And he looks at me like that, he was a gentleman, a bit overweighted, he had braces. I remember him like I would see him now, he was holding the braces with his thumbs, that's how he was stretching them and said: 'Comrade, it is not funny!' And I said, 'Well, I guess not, then.' I still thought it was a misunderstanding. And I said, 'And what's the problem then?' - 'Well, comrade, do you know what period it is now? And you exhibit such an abstraction there! ‘And now I stared at him again. I said, 'Wait, what abstraction?' I wasn't a representative of any purely abstract direction; I didn't even provoke anyone in any way. Actually, it is a question what abstraction really is. This would have to be discussed very broadly. So I said to the officer: 'Well, wait, where did you see the abstraction?' - 'Well, for example, your wife – the jewelry! Well, that's unsocialistic! ‘I looked amused, I laughed a little, he had a stone face and said, no well, well, well! Well, it is just not possible!'

"And the parents always said that there were no problems with the Germans, with the neighbors. They were friendly during the First Republic and somehow it did not differentiate, the Czech family, the German family. However, already at the end of that year, 1938, due to those promises and the story-telling... he and Hitler, in fact, danced to the tune of people by building roads, building tracks, building a lot. The employment rate was high, people often ascribed it to him and sometimes they were lured and began to believe that they would one day have a great homeland. Hitler had not yet said that he would murder half of Europe. But the things were already somehow suspected, and Dad said, 'Well, as we're sitting here like that, here is Helmut and here is the other friend, so in the evening...' people were leaving pubs around 7pm because dinners in those families took place everywhere at seven o'clock. It used to be that way, and when one didn't come at seven o'clock, for example the children, that we didn't come, there was no dinner. Dinner was simply served at seven, otherwise you were unlucky and you had bread there and you could spread it with jam or something. And Dad said, 'We go home at half past six...' and at half past ten, Helmut, who was sitting next to him playing the cards, during that friendly conversation, he was shooting at us with a German army nine gun from the opposite bank... we lived on that one bank and on the opposite bank behind the stream he was shooting at our windows."