Karel Freund

* 1949

  • “He was an idiot; he taught history and he was the school principal at that time. He was kind of reserved and he did not want to discuss anything with us. Once we heard that our English teacher Věra had displayed a photo of Mao Zedong in her office, which she shared with some other teachers, and in 1966 this could get her right in the shit. They found out about it and what we then did – the six or seven of us classmates – was that we got the idea to obtain photos of Mao and display them on our chests in protest. This principal was absolutely unnerved by it and he started telling us some nonsense because he did not get it at all. The principal’s deputy, who understood it immediately, then came there and told us: ‘You know, boys, take those pictures off, they really don’t go too well with your clothes’ or something like that. He simply told us: ‘Stop doing that.’ And everything was fine. We liked the deputy quite a lot, and we were happy that it turned out that way, and he was happy, too, and everyone was happy. The principal was totally enraged and he behaved like and he was acting crazy and threatening that he would have us expelled from school or what not… Only many years later I learnt from my mom – because this principal’s wife worked with my mom, and she was then telling her colleagues about it during one of their meetings in a café – that she was laughing so hard about it and she remarked: ‘It was so funny, they did it well! My Tonda is such an idiot.’ That was because when they had been expecting a baby some time in the 1950s, her husband Tonda had suggested to her that the baby boy ought to be named Mao. This idiot the principal thus thought that I had learnt about it from my mother, and therefore he was so mad. I realized it only ten years later when my mom told me about it. Incredible.”

  • “I thus went to Litoměřice to do my two-year army service, but at the same time I was still in the application process for university study of special education. Meanwhile I received the invitation for the interview and so I notified them about my situation and asked for another date of the interview and they replied that it would be no problem. I was undergoing the introductory army training at that time and I was not able to leave. In September the university sent me another invitation for the interview, but we had to go for some military exercise at the same time. I have never done anything like that in my life, and our battalion’s commander... (only later I learnt from Vráťa Brabenec that he was a printer from Počernice, an alcoholic, who ran away from his job and got himself drafted in the army in the 1950s. I was telling Vráťa about him and he said: ‘Yeah, Mydlář, I know him, he has three sisters, and so on…’ I was on bad terms with this battalion commander from the very beginning. When they were giving us the ‘welcome’ in the army, he yelled at us (he loved yelling) and he introduced himself ‘My name is major Mydlář’ and two or three of us guys burst into laughter as he said it and we had problems since then. He always liked to say that the kind of guys like us could shit above their heads but their shit would not fall down on our heads or something like that. When we had to go to the exercise to Doupov, I decided that I would pretend to be sick. I went to the army doctor and I pretended that I was in pain as if I had appendicitis. The doctor was quite understanding and so I told him the truth and he let me stay there and when the rest of the soldiers went for the exercise to Doupov, I went to Prague for the interview. The interview was held in Brandýs, and I passed. They notified me in a letter that I had passed, but the commander stole the letter. He was pissed off because he realized that I had cheated him and when I was finishing the army service about a year or year and a half later, he just waved this letter in front of my face. So that’s the way it was.”

  • “I received the draft notice and meanwhile I quit school and began working in a cleaning company in Voršilská Street. I was offered this job by some guy who studied Japanese at the university, and he probably needed to get rid of it, perhaps because he was already finishing his studies or for some other reason. He was a boyfriend or a friend of Jana Černá. It was a great experience – he was showing me how to do the cleaning work. He was sent to do the cleaning somewhere on Wenceslas Square and in Štěpánská Street and I accompanied him and as we were washing the windows in the Alcron Hotel there were some Japanese people who had a problem with the front desk. He heard their conversation and he went there and explained everything in Japanese to them. We then continued with the cleaning of the windows and the Japanese walked out of Alcron after a while and they lined up on the pavement like penguins and they began bowing. There was a station of the StB State Police opposite the hotel and they had cameras installed there. They must have gotten some nice pictures to look at.”

  • “Do you know what stolpersteins are? Certain German artist invented them a few years ago. Stolpersteins are small brass cubes which are installed in places from which some people came or from where they left for concentration camps. It began in Germany. Here in Prague they started doing it about two or three years ago. The Jewish Community or some organization which cooperates with them handles it. We were in Modřany with Vráťa (my son) and some other people about two years ago and we placed a stolperstein there. What was interesting was that an older lady who was in the garden there came to see it and she asked us what we were doing there. We had rung the bell to tell her about it, but it took her some time before she came and the it was already in progress before she got there. We explained what we were doing and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, my Grandma had lived here and I have heard about it from her.’ She knew something about the family of my father, and by coincidence, her parents had lived in somewhere in Smíchov. (I guess the older members of the family were living there in Modřany), and they had let my father a garden house in Smíchov where they lived. And by coincidence – or rather, not coincidence, but it just happened like that – those people had even lived somewhere in Smíchov, and he was imprisoned for a long time in relation to the assassination of Heidrich, or, perhaps, he even died in prison, but I don’t remember precisely and I don’t want to make things up. The lady promised that she would have her husband contact me later, because he knew a lot more about it, but he eventually didn’t contact me. But it does not matter; I have not visited the place since that time, either.”

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    doma, 01.11.2014

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To become a dissident was not a matter of some conscious choice; instead, we somehow gradually grew into it

freund orez.jpg (historic)
Karel Freund

  Karel Freund was born in 1949 in Košťany near Teplice. He was born in his father’s second marriage. Karel’s father was a doctor and as a Jew he spent several years in a concentration camp during the war, where he also lost his first family. When he finished elementary school in 1964, Karel began studying grammar school and after graduation he went to Prague, where he began studying Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 1968. In 1970 he wished to transfer to the Faculty of Pedagogy to focus on special education, but instead he received his draft notice for two years of army service. After his return from the army he and his friends became involved in the unofficial cultural life centred on the informal circle called Šafrán. In 1977 he signed Charter 77 and two years later he joined VONS (Committee for the Defence of Unjustly Persecuted). After 1989 he began working at the Ministry of Interior. He worked there for several years and then he began working in the non-profit organization Sananim, which helps drug addicted people, and in the Children’s home Korkyně. Later he went to work in the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Karel Freund is now retired and he lives in Prague.