Václav Daněk

“In 1945 [the Red Army and the NKVD] were taking in the emigrants. [Uncle and Auntie] lived in the ‘Russian House’ in Strašnice, it’s a corner house on Průběžná Street. Well, and in May 1945 they took a lot of men from there to the gulags, and few ever returned. But they brought my uncle a rehabilitation and they offered him Soviet citizenship, because they mapped all his previous activities and discovered that he was the victim of revolutionary errors. But he didn’t know that, he was in hiding in southern Bohemia, waiting for them to leave. They sent it to him from the embassy when the first NKVD agents, who were gathering the people up here, had already left. Of course, he refused the citizenship, but he accepted the rehabilitation and went to visit his native land, his native village. He was all aghast, because apart from one brother everyone was dead. Only then did he understand what had gone on there.”

“Later, when he was a Chartist, I arranged it so that he wouldn’t die of starvation and wouldn’t have to do manual labour. He was listed as a man on housework and he earned a living by doing translations for the radio, which were presented under other names. He was the most prolific author of foreign poetry at the radio, he was covered for by about seventeen people, mainly women, but they were all from the profession. They were mostly editors from Odeon and Mladá fronta.”

“She lived in a flat that she had split up with Shklovsky, who was a theoretician and the ideological leader of Futurists. And they didn’t get on together well, [Osip] Mandelstam was an Acmeist, and Futurists didn’t like Acmeists. It said on the doorbell: Mandelstam and Shklovsky. I rang it, Nadezhda came to open the door and gestured [me to be quiet] and pointed to show that Shklovsky was there. Even though he was fine, there was still that mistrust. And we only communicated as among mutes. She took a bag, showed me some photos and put them inside, she showed me some texts and put them in the bag. She put on a coat and we went shopping. She took me... This was under Krushchev, when things were calming down, but they were still afraid of the KGB... She took me to a park bench, glanced around to see if anyone was sitting nearby - she chose a central bench, to have a good view. She was afraid at home too, afraid of bugs. And even in the park... She just pointed at my bag and whispered. ‘Otkroyte [Open it]. I give you manuscripts an’ photographii, which I brought.’ She dropped them inside, and we talked for a bit longer, then we went to the shop, then she said goodbye and I left. That’s how I brought her memoirs, the first volume, which she had still written together with Oten.”

“We came to Kralupy, and I rode through the square on my bike. Some German boys older than me rushed out from several alleyways. They were already in the Hitlerjugend, those Henleinite youth activists. They knocked me off the bike and beat me up. That’s how it started. That was at the end of August (1937), and in September, October, they held a demonstration in front of the school: ‘Hier ist deutsches Reich! Gehen sie in Böhmen.’ [This is the German empire! Go away to Bohemia.] And Henlein’s motto was: ‘Arbeit und Brot!’ [Work and Bread] Our school’s caretaker was a German, he worked at the Chomutov Poldi Works, and he was a Social Democrat. His wife was as well. So the caretaker opened a school window right above the crowd, he took two loaves of bread, which were meant for the children at school, and he threw them into the demonstration, saying: ‘Hier haben sie Brot!’ Here’s your bread. ‘And what do you mean Arbeit? You work at Poldi, you at Mannesmann, so what Arbeit?’ And they started laughing and lost their unity, and the demonstration lost its wind and dissolved somehow. So that one didn’t work out.”