Jan Pötzl

"So first of all, he has to have a resonant wood, that's important. He has to have an idea of what he wants to make out of it and how it should sound, but mostly everybody wants it to sound the best, so they do their best, right? Some people succeed, some people fail, and then he has to have the diligence to sit on his butt and devote every day to it so that in a month, in two months, he can build the instrument. And when the instrument is finished, as in physically built, you still have to go back and tweak it. The instrument changes as it matures, and everything on the instrument settles - the strings, the bow and the soundpost - and the instrument changes a little bit. So then, the violin maker tries to tune it to his liking. Where he wants the E string to be a little bit brighter or the G string to be deeper, which can then be corrected with the fingerboard or the soundpost. And then there's all kinds of little tricks that either work or don't work, there's a lot of question marks after that, well."

"That was interesting. That time, in 1942, when Heydrich was assassinated, after the assassination, there were big arrests, and it was very unpleasant, and my mother's cousin, Jan Konopík, a doctor, lived nearby. And they arrested him during those actions as well, and he was imprisoned in Terezín. At that time, he was also in the Communist Party. He was a communist during the war, so that was an even bigger problem, so they arrested him, de facto unjustly because he had nothing to do with the assassination. All the relatives around him gave him up, renounced him because they had problems so that they wouldn't have more problems. So he had no one to stand up for him. So my mother asked my father if something could be done about it. And my father, knowing Mr Konopík and knowing that he had nothing to do with it, said he would try. My father was such a man that if there was any injustice, he would go to solve the cause. So he said that he went to Prague, that he bought a badge on Wenceslas Square, they sold these 'haknkrajec' there. So he put it in his pocket, and when he was in front of the Gestapo headquarters in Prague, he pinned it on and went in. And before he got to the Gestapo commander, he had to go through five guards before he was shown in, and the commander asked him what he wanted, what he wished for. Well, he explained to him that Konopík was not an assassin, that he had nothing to do with it, that he was not interested in politics, and that he was simply interested in medicine and medical science. And the commander looked at him and said, well, Mr. Pötzl, I'll check it, and if it's not true, you'll go to Terezín. That was the end of it. A month later, Mr Konopik was transferred to the sick bay, where he served as a doctor, and three months later, he was discharged, and that's how he got out of Terezín. He was truly very grateful to my father at that time, and I think he may have even saved him."