“My family was staying in our summer house, and so I went there and the local village radio was linked to the main broadcasting and you could only hear some sad funeral music being played all the time. So I rushed to their office and I asked the technician: ‘What are you broadcasting, it's horrible, you would dig a grave for yourself just by listening to this, and the news in between…’ She replied: ‘Well, that’s the only record I have here!’ Later I got hold of some other record, but I had to laugh about it so much. The music was utterly depressing, it was the kind of music which is played only at funerals, and now you have the events of August and the broadcast was being interrupted with this kind of news – this and that is happening at some place…”
“It is only now that you see what was happening there. We did not know it at that time. You'd have to see the mechanism they used. Since his wife was an Aryan, when my father died in the concentration camp, they sent the urn and all his personal belongings that he had, including the wedding ring, which they had cut to get it off his finger. Watch, glasses, I have all this at home. They sent it all, because they knew that he had an Aryan wife. When somebody’s parents died, nothing was sent at all. They had these procedures. We did not know at all what was going on in the camp. We received a death certificate which stated that he had died of cardial arrest; you know, they did not write what they had done to him, so they knew how to maintain decorum. Only after the war one could see what was happening there. We could not imagine the camp, and I have not even lived like that, I became affected by it only later when I was fourteen, and when I followed the war, and I thus knew that Germany would be defeated before I turned fourteen. I had maps at home, and I watched the progress of the front, and I could see it on these maps.”
“We were children, I was twelve years old. At this age you never think that something might happen to you, you don’t think about death. So for example, we distributed food to the barricades, and some crazy guys were shooting at us, but as a child you just do not realize that something might happen. People at this age just don’t care. In the same way, we were running around among burning houses after an air raid, and there were even some time-bombs still there, which could explode any time, but for us it was interesting, we were running there in the ruins. Sometimes when I see some photographs, I think that it cannot even have been possible. But as a child you regard these things in an absolutely different way.”
Richard Seemann was born on 8th September 1933 in Prague into a Czech-German family of Jewish origin. Richard‘s father, who was a composer and journalist, died in the concentration camp Flossenbürg in 1942. Since Richard was considered as a first-grade cross-breed, he was due to board a transport when he was fourteen. Already when he was ten years old he was keeping detailed records about the development of the war. He kept his interest in history and later he published several studies. In 1951 he passed a job interview for the foreign broadcast department of the Czechoslovak Radio, which at that time served as a shelter for people who were inconvenient to the political regime. In 1966 he received an offer to work as a foreign correspondent in Bonn. However, he refused to sign an agreement of collaboration with the State Police and he eventually did not get the job. In August 1968 he participated in the broadcasting from the occupied building of the Czechoslovak Radio and afterwards from the provisional studio in Nusle where he was preparing reports for foreign broadcasting. In 1970 he left the Communist Party and subsequently he was dismissed from the Radio. For the following 20 years he was working in a boiler-room and in an ironmonger‘s shop. After 1989 he returned to the Radio, where he served as the managing director of the Czechoslovak Federal Radio. After his retirement in 1993 he worked as a foreign policy commentator in the daily newspaper Slovo and in the magazine Mezinárodní politika. From 1997- 2004 he was a member of the Czech Radio Council, which he presided during two electoral terms. He still serves as a commentator on events in German-speaking countries for Czech Radio Plus.
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