Professor Josef Čermák

"A German inspector came to Jilemnice because a report had come in that students from the sixth had gouged out Hitler's eyes from a photograph in the square when they went to gym class. As a result, he arrived - his name was Verner, and he had this evil face. He investigated it, and the grammar school in Jilemnice was closed down."

"We were already expecting it, and we said, 'Konev is going to fight.' Konev's army was already behind the Giant Mountains. From Poland, we could already hear it roaring. When the Russians came, there were bad experiences with them. Suddenly, a cab came to our yard. There were five soldiers on it. They wanted vodka. We didn't have any, so we offered beer. It was a Saturday, my mother had washed the floor, and these guys were walking around in muddy boots, and all they could see were eggs. They cracked maybe 60 eggs. These guys rode into the yard and let the horses out into the beautiful meadow. Thunder took it, we were liberated. And now they're out there making a mess, then they're gone. Three hours later, the NKVD [People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs - transl.] arrived. They were examining us and asking us if so-and-so had arrived there. I said that they were with us. And to describe it, they said. So I described it. Then they picked up and left. And then I asked the mayor, and he told me that they were taken away and shot. In Germany, they were allowed everything, but I guess not here."

"During the Protectorate at the end of the war, German saved our lives. There was a railway line a hundred metres from our house, and that's when foreigners, prisoners, started escaping from German transports. So it happened that the peasants of Roztoky, the reliable ones, when there was no danger of being unloaded somewhere, arranged that two foreigners were always delegated to the peasant houses for a period of a week to 14 days. And so two Ukrainians came to us. These boys had a very modest bed, upstairs in a barn on straw. They slept during the day, and in the evening, they helped chop wood, ate and so on. It was only for a week or a fortnight, and then they went on again. A German truck came into the yard, and soldiers jumped out. There could have been six, ten of them. They were running towards the surrounding buildings. My mother realised the seriousness of the situation at that moment and ran out and said to them in that terrible Ihotec German: 'What would you like?' The commandant whistled and said in German: 'It's the Germans, fellow Germans.' They got in the cars and drove off."

"I had a map of the whole world on my desk. And when somebody came to me and said that there was a very interesting literature in Samoa and that we had never published anything from there, I called Žilina, and he started to name some writers who were already there. When Žilina promised something, you had to remind him, or he wouldn't deliver; but then he brought me a bearded guy, and he started telling me about what was being written in Samoa in the thirteenth century... and soon the book was out! I loved doing this."

"I remember a meeting from the time when Honza Řezáč was still the editor-in-chief. A collection of the works of the German Romantic poet Achim von Arnim was to be published, and our then art editor brought a cover with a limp "i" on a white surface and nothing else. All the managers said, 'What is this crap?' And Honza Řezáč just said, 'Fantastic!' They started arguing, and he said: "You have absolutely no sensibility!" I looked at it like it was a theatre play. Then someone timidly dared to ask: 'But Honza, what are we supposed to think about this? Was that guy drunk or what? What's that supposed to mean?' - 'Well, AchIm von ArnIm, there are two I's! And that he's falling? That's the romanticism.'"