"My father urged me, all three of us. He said, after his experience, 'Get out of here.' Father said, 'There will never be peace here.' He was so disgusted! World War I, World War II, communism. I say the fact that I escaped meant I actually obeyed my father. I was raised in a way that I obeyed my father. But on the other hand, of course we all knew that communism was amoral. We all had to pretend, lie. Basically, we lived in a lie. "
"But the Germans began to take revenge, so whoever had anything to do with the church, they imprisoned them. Bishop, priest, my grandfather. In a few weeks there was a martial court, they were sentenced to death. My grandfather, all of them were shot in Kobylisy. There is a memorial in Kobylisy, where everyone was executed- all my relatives, families of the paratroopers, together almost 264 people, I often visit it when I am in Prague. They were at first imprisoned in Pankrac, then in Theresienstadt then in Mathausen. All of them were designated with "return is undesired". At first we thought they had died in the gas chambers, but then when the archives in Mauthausen opened, it turned out that they had been executed by a gunshot wound to the back, as the Germans did it. We basically lived in fear for the rest of the war, the Gestapo came to us three times, the father was a product of Austro-Hungarian education, he spoke perfect German, he managed to drive them away three times, he once told them we have rubeola, then it was a streptococcal infection, the Germans were afraid, so they left. They came for us, for the children of the mother who was in the concentration camp. "
"We were able to communicate with her by mailing cards, so that everyone could read it. I have a copy of the mailing card that my mother sent from Terezín, where she writes: 'I am sorry that I could not accompany Pavlíček to school because it is one of the joys of every mother to be able to take her son to first class. ' In 1942. The Heydrichiad was in May, I went to the first class in September of that year, in October my grandfather was executed. "
"The Czechs took revenge on them, in that spirit ... The Germans behaved terribly, I remember. Not only did they hang from those pillars, but they still burned them, the corpses. I remember that we drove in a car and my father pushed my head under seat, so I don't see the corpses hanging, so I have such a personal memory. And a second personal memory I have, still completely "living", I have, how they arrested the German civilians, I saw a woman, almost naked, a huge portrait of Hitler hanging on her neck, and she was holding such a wooden pistol. They were making fun of them, they were taking revenge. The image of this woman is still living in my memory. And a third image, which I still recall completley, is when we went to Zofin, and when they wanted to get rid of the corpses of German soldiers, they just threw them into Vltava, into the river. And we saw the inflated corpses sailing to Mělník, then to the Elbe - we sent them to Germany. So I recall those inflated corpses sailing in the river in the direction to Melnik."
Pavel (now Paul) Ort was born on April 15, 1936 in Prague. His grandfather Jan Sonnevend was the chairman of the elders of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church. After the assassination of Heydrich, it was he who designed the crypt of the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street as a shelter for paratroopers Gabčík, Kubiš and others. The Nazis executed him on September 4, 1942 at a shooting range in Kobylisy, Prague. Paul’s mother, Ludmila Ryšavá, also joined the anti-Nazi resistance, and according to the witness, she carried food and clothing to the hidden paratroopers. The Nazis executed her together with her mother Maria Sonnevend on October 24, 1942 in KT Mauthausen. The witness’s parents divorced in 1939, and Pavel and his siblings were entrusted to the care of their father, a prominent physician, MUDr. Miloslav Ort. Pavel had a hard time getting to the grammar school. He finally graduated from the Medical Faculty of Charles University, graduating in 1961. The following year, he decided to emigrate. He escaped from a trip to Tunisia and after a long anabasis ended up with distant relatives in Venezuela. He settled in New York, where he studied orthopedics and surgery. He served as a professor at NYU (New York University) and head of the orthopedic department of the Federal Veterans Hospital in Manhattan. Even before arriving in the USA, as a doctor, he took part in a six-month expedition in the Amazon rainforest mapping the border between Venezuela and Brazil. In 2021, Paul Ort lived in New York and was about to translate his diary entries from the Amazon expedition from Czech into English.
