“I can’t remember when I was approached to join. I wasn’t interested, my father wasn’t a party member and nobody else in our family was. I kept discussing it endlessly with him and he was saying: ,Listen, if you want to live here and raise your kids here, if you want to get somewhere in medicine, you will have to join.’ So, in the end I did. Without it I would never have gone to the US, that’s for sure. I’m convinced that all the non-party members who were doing long internships in the West, well, I don’t want to say it out loud, but you can guess what they were. Interestingly, I was never approached by State Police to become an agent. I don’t know why. On coming back from an internship, everyone had to be debriefed at the so-called Tile House (=contemporary nickname for the Ministry of Interior). They asked all kinds of questions. And I said: ,Listen, let me tell you something, as far as I could see, the US is not preparing a war. A state starts preparing for war when they are facing a crisis, when they’re not doing well. They’re doing so well, though, they’re so happy and laid-back, they have no reason at all to be considering going into war.”
“In Nepomuk, there was some artillery battery, and it was awful. One of the commanding officers was a Gypsy. The people there were quite strange, I’d never met anyone like them. I could barely leave the sickroom for all the stabbing and cutting injuries. ,He fell on my knife’ was a popular quote there. The hygiene was just atrocious, I wanted to introduce some changes. It was a large unit, lots of soldiers, and they washed their mess kit in these stone troughs with filthy water. They washed their mess kit in it when they finished eating. As I couldn’t leave the sickroom, someone had lent me the book ,Černí baroni’ (,The Auxiliary Engineering Corps’) and I spent my time typing it up. I stamped every page with the official stamp of Military Unit Nepomuk. I’ve still got the typed-up copy.”
“Two of my father’s cousins left for England. One was Fricek Ervin Kisch. You see, Egon Ervin Kisch is our relative. So Fricek Ervin Kisch and Honza Pick, not sure whether they left with Winton Trains, but they were seventeen, eighteen years old and went to England. I have brought a photo from when Honza Pick came back. He was a pilot in England, trained in Canada and then came back. They were the only two from the family who survived, otherwise everybody else died in concentration camps. You see, I often go abroad to conferences, and I meet many foreign doctors. Once I was chatting to a German doctor and this topic came up. He went all serious and said: “Obviously, I know a lot about it, but you are the first person I have ever met whose family has been so badly affected by it.” He was really shaken. And I said: “It’s not your fault, you hadn’t even been born then.” And he replied: “That’s not the point. I carry it inside of me.”
“That’s why I remember so clearly that November 17 was a Friday. I was working a shift, shifts didn’t get distributed evenly like they do now. We came to work on Friday morning and didn’t leave till Monday evening. So, I was working the whole weekend. We heard what had happened and then on Saturday afternoon my boys came to see us in Krč hospital. I called everyone in and my boys told us what had happened. On Monday morning – I don’t know how many Party members we were at the surgical department – everyone returned their membership books. This was at a time when no one knew what would happen next. And that Monday there was a huge demo. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get my wife down because she’d be scared. She wanted to go shopping for a new carpet, though, so I told her we’re going, and we went to Wenceslas Square. And we were bang in the middle of a huge demo. And we joined it. They announced we’d be marching to the Castle, and so we went. The Charles Bridge was closed off, though, and people got seriously jammed together in front of it. My wife is claustrophobic and she kept saying: ,I’m gonna lose my mind here.’ And so we pushed our way down Karlova street away from there. There was an incredible jam. Earlier in the year during Palach Week, me and my sons went to Wenceslas Square together, but we were all athletes, runners, and so no one was able to catch us.”
“Medicine in the USA was well advanced as opposed to Czechoslovakia. As regards practical impact of medicine on the society, what I learnt there was that in a functional society one should do what they have trained for, got a licence for and what they are paid for. This means that a doctor who’s a surgeon performs surgeries and a nurse cares for the patients. Whereas back home at the time it was normal for doctors to fill in for nurses, for nurses to fill in for cleaners, and the cleaners who represented the ruling proletarian class to do nothing at all. What I came to understand in the US was that being a football and ice-hockey referee is a job like any other. The referee is not an office worker, he doesn’t spend his time in the office doing paperwork to bring in a little extra income by refereeing at the weekends, but a professional. In the USA, a thief is a thief fulltime, he doesn’t steal a bag of cement from a construction site here and a couple of bricks there. He does it fulltime and accepts the risk of being caught and going to prison. People do what they do professionally, not as a hobby.”
Professor Jan Pirk was born on April 20, 1948, in Prague. His paternal grandfather came from a Jewish family of doctors and most of his relatives perished in concentration camps during World War Two. The grandfather was saved thanks to his mother’s decision to sign a statement declaring that she had conceived her son with a Gentile rather than her Jewish husband. Before the coup of 1948, Jan Pirk’s maternal grandfather Hraba had been a successful businessman and factory owner. After the coup, communists nationalised his factory and imprisoned him, sentencing him to hard labour in Kladno coalmines. Jan Pirk wanted to become a sailor and later a medical doctor at a transatlantic ship. He studied at a grammar school in Prague and in 1972, graduated from the Faculty of General Medicine of Charles University. He got married while studying and later had two sons with his wife. On concluding his one-year obligatory military service, he joined the surgical department in Nymburk hospital and in 1974, as a PhD candidate and research assistant, transferred to the cardiovascular department of the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM). Between 1983-1984, he spent a year at a prestigious private clinic in New Orleans, USA, and started sharing what he had learnt about the most contemporary trends in cardiac surgery with his colleagues. He had joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party before leaving for the US residency. Although it had accelerated his professional career, he considers it his personal failure. In January 1989, still as a Party member, he took his two sons to anti-state demonstrations during the so-called Palach Week. After the violent dispersal of the student demonstration at Národní street on November 17, 1989, he cancelled his membership in the Communist Party by returning his Communist Book on November 20th. Between 1990-1991, he worked as a consultant at the university clinic in Ostende, Denmark. He accepted the invite by Martin Bojar, the Minister of Health, to come back to IKEM in 1991 as a senior consultant. In 1995, he became the head of IKEM’s Cardiac Centre. In 2020, he was still the head, was living in Prague and had seven grandchildren.
