“What did your father do?” – In Terezín?” He was a judge.” – “What did it mean?” – “It was somehow laughable. Because even there, there were thefts, rapes. When someone did something bad – there were even rapes – they were directly sent into the next transport. People did not know at that time that they were sent to their deaths. In the Heim, the leader raped girls, so my dad sentenced him. Besides, he dealt with various thefts. That also was happening there – that someone stole shoes or something similar to someone else.” – “The Terezín court… Germans let the Terezín administration to deal with the misdemeanours of this type.” – “Yes, the administration dealt with misdemeanours of this type. For example, they dealt with inheritances. When someone died and did not have any relatives… So, my dad used to bring me various small gifts that nobody claimed. Like a pencil. That kinds of things happened there, too."
“I happened like this, first we gathered – there was a list of Jews at the fortress in Mladá Boleslav. There we perhaps spent the night. Everything was listed there. Only after, the transport took place. It was still sometimes in the winter. I remember it was cold. We were wrapped up in clothes, we wore everything we owned. We looked terrible. We went ordinarily by train to Mladá Boleslav with baggage – and people laughed at us there, on the train.” – “Because you wore many clothes?” – “We looked like scarecrows.” – “Did you already wear yellow badges? How did the people respond to it?” – “Well, it depends. Some laughed. Some pretended they do not see it. I did not take it seriously. I liked the star. That I somehow stand out from the average."
“I was stealing, too. I remember that when they were unloading some food one day, I tried to snatch something. One day I was stealing some potatoes which had rolled away, and the ghettowache caught me and took my hat from me. It was in winter, and it was awfully cold in those years. I begged him on my knees to give me my hat back. He eventually gave it back to me. I returned him the potatoes and he returned me my hat.”
“In 1945 there was a regular camp in Poběžovice, it is in the Chodsko region. They provided accommodation for us in a camp which had been left empty when the Hitlerjugend had left. The area of Poběžovice was quite German and people had not yet been deported from there. We did not like them at that time. From time to time we marched in a kind of a ceremonial march. Rovers walked in the front, they were armed, they had rifles, guns and submachine guns. Then we carried our flags and what was great about it was that we had Soviet flags as well. We were marching through those villages like this and the Germans were stepping out from their houses and staring. And our rovers were beating those men who had not taken their hats off as our flag passed by, and they were slamming them in their faces… I also remember that we were raising the flags, the Czech and Soviet one. It was in the American zone. They played the Czech and Soviet anthems on the gramophone. Our commander, the leader of the Scout unit, was probably a communist. One day when we had our roll call, an American sentry came there. They cut off the Soviet flag from the flagpole. They shoved it inside their rubber boots like this and they smashed the signboard against our commander’s head. Then they left without a word. We thought it strange. We thought that Americans were great friends of the Russians. It didn’t occur to me at all at that time.”
“I also remember that international committee. We received sardines and oranges and then we had to return them. We had to say to the commander – at that time if was Rahm, an SS man – ‘Onkel Rahm, da sind wieder Sardinen und Orangen?’ which means something like: ‘Uncle Rahm, sardines and oranges again?’ And Jewish cameramen were shooting all this. Well, what a shame it was with that committee.” Interviewer: “So you received a precisely counted number of these things and then you had to give them back?”– “Yes, we received them only for the making of that film. And sidewalks were made in the same way. Everything was being cleaned and washed. They were making kind of stage props. It was indeed a Potemkin village. A Jewish bank. A café. There were shops, but there was actually nothing inside them.”
Jiří Munk was born on November 2, 1932 in Brandýs nad Labem. Jiří’s father Adolf worked in his private lawyer’s office. Jiří, who was the youngest of three children, was raised by a nurse-maid. Just like the whole Jewish community in Brandýs, the Munk family was secularized. In 1938, Jiří’s father was banned from performing his services as a lawyer, and he took upon himself the thankless task of leading the Jewish community. The subsequent anti-Jewish regulations which were put into place brought the family into isolation and made them loose nearly all their property. People laughed at the family as they were riding the train to join the transport from Mladá Boleslav. When they arrived to Terezín, Jiří was not placed into the kinderheim but he remained with his mother. They stayed in the Hamburg barracks. What he remembers above all was the constant hunger and cold. His father was the only one from the family who has not survived the war; he died in Auschwitz. Jiří and his mother left Terezín in an empty bus which had been dispatched by Boy Scouts from Brandýs to bring back the town’s fellow citizens. A new landlord chased them away from the door of their former house. They found asylum in the home of Jiří’s uncle in Prague. When he returned to school, Jiří realized how much he was lagging behind after five years of no schooling. With luck and considerable effort he managed to graduate from architecture at the Czech Technical University. He refused his job placement to start working as a propaganda worker to help establish agricultural cooperatives (JZD) for the company Agroprojekt in Liberec. As a consequence of his decision, he was tried at court and sentenced to imprisonment with a suspended sentence. This negatively affected his personal profile, and for two years he was thus unable to find a permanent job. Later he worked in the company Jednota-Západ, at first as a bricklayer and maintenance worker, and later in the cooperative’s project department. In the 1960s he participated on restoration of retail facilities in Prague - working on renewal of shops along the Royal Mile. In 1968 Jiří established the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN) in the Union of Architects. With his wife Alena Munková (née Synková), who was a sister of exile writer František Listopad, they wrote screenplays for the popular children’s television bedtime stories “Večerníček” for the company Krátký Film Praha. Among other, they authored the series like Štaflík a Špagetka, they wrote screenplays to the stories of Edudant and Francimor or screenplays based on the book Anička Skřítek a Slaměný Hubert. In the 1990s he worked as a freelancer, and one of his assignments included cooperation with the Prague Jewish Community on a study on utilization of property which had been returned to them in restitutions.
