"I'll describe how it worked. We got some Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union organization letterhead and a stamp, which was no problem at all at the time. We wrote on that paper that the group... and there were just eight of us agreed that we want to go to Russia together. So, we wrote there the names, passport numbers and I don't know what... and that we were exchanging with some Komsomol organization in Moscow that we completely made up. And we handed in the passports and that paper at the Passport Department of Public Security. It lay there for a month and then they returned it to us and put the desired AB-change stamp in our passport. We were able to travel to Russia with it. But then it was still necessary to ensure that we could travel to the places we wanted to in Russia. So, we prepared a paper on behalf of the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union saying that this group will travel along the route Moscow, Abakan, Kyzyl, Abakan and back. And then came the main trick, I'm still proud of what we came up with and then we had this officially translated. If you've ever seen what an officially translated document looks like, there's a ribbon in state colors, full of stamps, seals. And with that, when we arrived at the border in Russia, they took it like this, looked at it for a while and said: 'Well, that's strange, foreigners don't normally go to Kyzyl, but if it's written here...' And they issued us the so-called “puťovka”, in which it was written what route we were supposed to follow, and we followed it according to the paper and never had the slightest problem with it."
"Actually, he was a dentist all his life, except for the war, when he was persecuted as a Jew, they were supposed to take him away in some kind of transport, and they didn't take him away. He hid with some people throughout the war. Unfortunately, I still don't know who it was, I could be grateful to them for his and my life. It is interesting that in the Prague synagogue, where there is a list of all the Jews who stayed in the concentration camps, there is also his name with the correct date of birth, he was born on December 17, 1905, but apparently, he did not stay in any concentration camp. But all his relatives stayed there, he had three siblings, I think my father was still alive, so he was actually the only survivor of the whole family. Two more of his nieces, who then moved to Israel, he took care of them here for a very long time and very selflessly after the war, so they considered him almost their own father. Then we were together when I was little, in Israel, and they treated him with great gratitude and respect."
Ondřej Šteffl was born on November 20, 1954 in Prague. He got his last name after his mother, Zdeňka Štefflová, who came from Prague and worked as a corporate lawyer. His father Arnošt Ungár came from a Jewish family from Dolný Kubín, his native language was Hungarian. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Prague, where he stayed. He hid during the war and managed to escape from the transport to a concentration camp, where his parents and siblings died. He was a pre-war communist and was imprisoned for two years in the 1950s and later rehabilitated. He worked as a dentist. At the time of Ondřej‘s birth, he already had two adult daughters from his first marriage. Ondřej Šteffl was exceptionally gifted in mathematics, so the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics was a clear choice for him after graduation. From 1978 he worked at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and in 1986 he defended his dissertation thesis in sociology. Since the end of his university studies, he worked as an external teacher of mathematics and physics at Prague secondary grammar schools, and even then he was thinking about the quality of teaching and, above all, how it could be improved. The space opened up for him after the Velvet Revolution. Already in September 1990, he founded the PORG secondary grammar school, in which there was extraordinary interest from the beginning. After five years being in charge, he left and found Scio. Since its inception, it has focused mainly on the evaluation of educational outcomes, and today its exams are used in the admissions process by more than sixty faculties of public universities in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and elsewhere. In 2015, the Scio company opened the first ScioSchool in Prague in Chodov, from September 2023 nineteen ScioSchools will be operating throughout the country. Today, Ondřej Štefl is a co-owner of the company and a member of the management. At the time of filming (2023) he lived in Osinalice in the Mělník district.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
