"We went there when we were nineteen years old, which was somewhere around 1970. They wanted to revive that youth movement or whatever. So they opened this construction. But different people started coming to work there. It wasn't the enthusiasts who used to go there in the fifties. On the contrary, there were adventurers, people with lousy cadre profiles, people who had nowhere to go and needed somewhere to live, at least for that one year. People from orphanages. A very remarkable company. I certainly wouldn't say they were politically affected. It was truly very interesting to be there, to interact with these people. We stayed at the Prunéřov power station, where they had built a couple of likusaks [simple single-storey houses - transl.]. It was like a little town. And that was our residence. There weren't many girls there. In the middle, there was one house where girls and married couples lived."
"My dad absolutely refused to deal with and adjust to the 1950s. He lived completely freely. I guess after the concentration camp and then he was also in a Communist labour camp - from where he could only go home on Saturdays and Sundays - where there were people who hated to work, so he was there for a month or so. I believe the only time they let him go was for a wedding. He experienced that and he didn't care about the communists. He acted as if they didn't exist. And then it didn't pay off. It was in my dad's blood to make money, he just liked to make money. He liked fancy things, he wanted his family to have it all. And he refused to accept that it wasn't possible. That it was dangerous. Absolutely. So he traded, first with Caci, and then on his own."
"My father and Moshe survived and returned to Mukachevo [in Carpathian Ruthenia] after the war, and hardly anyone from that large Davidovich family still lived there at the time. Partly, they weren't there anymore because, as they returned one by one from the war, they managed to leave, and partly because they perished in the concentration camps. When my father came back [from the concentration camp], he found his brother Moshe there and his favourite cousin, whose name was Zoltán. With him, they opted for Czechoslovak citizenship and moved to Prague. Prague was supposed to be just a transfer point for my dad before leaving for his family, part of which was already in England and part in America. One or two of his cousins lived in France, and it was planned that Zoltán and my dad would go to them. In Zoltán's case, that's how it turned out. He left and then lived in New York and Florida as a very successful, very wealthy, very happy man. My dad met my mom and refused to leave. The two of them married in 1950, and I was born a year after that."
Hana Frištenská Štarková was born on 16 June 1951 in Prague. Her mother, Alena Hájková, came from Prague and grew up in the family of a liberal father who hated communists. The witness’ father, Ludvík Štark, grew up in Carpathian Ruthenia in a family of Orthodox Jews, survived concentration camps in Hungary and Germany, and moved to Prague after the war. In 1954, her father, who at the time was avoiding compulsory attendance at work, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In 1961, her mother divorced her father and her new husband adopted Hana. Hana Frištenská Štarková was trained as a saleswoman, but because of her cadre report, she was not able to apply to university. A year spent on the construction site during the Tušimice II power plant building improved her report card, and she was admitted into law school. In 1975, her son was born. After graduating from law school, she worked as a Roma curator in the Social Services Administration. Since 1990, she has focused on the rights of national minorities at the Government Office. In 2019, she published a book titled “To Each His Israel”. In 2022, she retired and served on the boards of non-profit organizations.
