Prof. RnDr., DrSc Helena Illnerová

"I think when dad understood what the times were like afterwards, where things were going, he tried to get away. He had friends at the Romanian embassy and hoped to go via Romania. He had some contacts and hoped they might get him to the resistance movement and onwards from Romania, but that didn't work out. He then tried the Turkish Embassy because he actually worked as a lawyer at the Turkish Embassy. They said they would try to arrange it, but they didn't dare do it on their own. They wrote to Ankara to ask if it was possible, and Ankara reported it to the Gestapo in Prague. Daddy was questioned at the Gestapo and then he went to Terezín with the first ever contingent, or the Aufbaukommando, as it was called. So, my dad went to Terezín in November 1941."

"I remember it quite well, not the 5th of June, of course, but I remember the day it happened [the execution of my grandfather], because by then my mother was alone with us. It was the summer, we were in Dobřichovice, and my mother came from Prague all in black and crying; she said that my grandfather was already dead. Of course, I was four years old at the time, so I couldn't really fathom what 'dead' meant, and I said, 'He's not going to bring us candy anymore.'

“But, there was a certain surprising positive aspect to it. When you’re taking part in the conferences and you listen well to what is being said there, you will identify the current trends in science. You learn what the main stream of science is researching, or you get a hint that the mainstream will turn in another direction. Sometimes you hear an incredibly interesting message, and everybody starts imitating it because they see how it might continue. When you don’t go to the conferences, you get a bit isolated. You lose the perception of what is currently ‘in’. It’s a little bit like following fashion: you know the current trend, so you know the direction to go and whom to cite. But, it may happen to you – when you’re a relatively good thinker – that you’ll follow the right, original direction yourself and that you’ll become a sort of a fashion guru yourself. In 1989, when I came to the conference, I heard them saying: ‘Look, Illnerová is here. Let’s go and take a look at her’. Because they already knew my name from literature even though they had never seen me in person before. By that time, I wasn’t the youngest anymore. So, it was actually possible to do something here without the knowledge of the larger world, and finally it turned out to be right. Maybe, if I had listened too much to what the others were saying, I wouldn’t have chosen that original way which brought results later on.”

“I began to study the development of the Pineal gland and it turned out to be a wonderful organ because it would cyclically produce the hormone Melatonin. It produces Melatonin at night but not during the day. You could see such beautiful sinusoids going up and down. At that time, I studied the whole metabolism. I was lucky with my discovery, but you have this very true saying, that: 'Luck is waiting for those who are ready to use it'. I used to go to the animal holding room at night with a red flashlight. One night, I forgot that red flashlight, and I thus had to leave the door to the room partly opened for about five minutes in order to let the light from the hall shine into the room. Those five minutes of illumination changed all the measured values of the Pineal gland. In this way, I discovered that even a brief illumination has an immense influence on the Pineal gland. Of course it took me a long time and a lot of research to find out the cause of this. Only after a long time did I find out about the existence of something that I hadn’t known prior to that, and that is the biological clock located in the brain of mammals. By shedding light on the animals, I turned the clock to a wholly different time.”

“My mommy had some jewelry that she had gotten from my daddy at some occasion. I think that it might have been at the 10th anniversary of their wedding. She decided to sell that jewelry to a Belgian who then sent us some money for the purchase of a little car. That Belgian did this sort of business on a grand scale, and, therefore, it is no wonder that it leaked out and that it was turned into an affair. My mother was involved in it and had to go to court. The transaction was interpreted as an unauthorized foreign exchange operation or, better said, unauthorized selling of something. For my mom this whole affair was terribly agonizing because my dad hadn’t known about it at all. My mom was an amazing personality, and she was a risk taker, so she was certainly aware of the risk this entailed. She knew that the transaction was far from being perfectly legal. However, she had decided to undertake it nonetheless. So, we got a car but my mom was faced with a trial. Even though her father was a university professor, the expert opinions said that she was of bourgeois origin--these were the ugly labels they put on people. It was in 1960, at the very end of the 1950s, and my mom was terribly anxious that they would kick me and my sister out of university. We were then just about to graduate. One day before the trial, she hanged herself. That was a truly awful end of my childhood.”