Mojmír Kyselka

“Even our back-of-nowhere street was visited by Jerries in their green pelerines, and more importantly, I started attending school after the occupation, and my parents stuck a little pennant made out of beads into my autumn coat, a Czechoslovak pennant, some patriotic gesture I guess, and I was on my way home passing by the brewers’ houses and a young German woman saw me. And when she saw the pennant, she called to me: ‘Komm hier!’ So I came up to her and she gave a proper few slaps, threw the pennant into the gutter, and I legged it home in tears, knowing my parents were threatened by the Gestapo. Then the streets started filling with the green of German soldiers and officers, but things were quiet otherwise. There were raids on Jews, Mum experienced that, but it was really quiet otherwise.”

“I was a left-leaning person from the outset. When they abolished the Scouts, I led a special Pioneer troop, and the geographical society exists even today, seventy years later. And then it started to collapse; the first blow to my left-wing opinions was my visit to the Soviet Union when I was twenty-two, where I saw what accommodation people had there, and they didn’t live in decrepit residential houses, but I saw some kind of metal-plated structure, which the people crawled out of in the morning to go to work, and I saw one-legged war veterans begging opposite Lenin’s mausoleum, and I saw the horrendous poverty and the fatalism and apathy of the Russians.”