Miroslav Štrobl

"And maybe with the hindsight of the years, and age qualifies me to say that, I can say we were naive. That we thought that socialism could somehow be reformed. Well, it can't. It can't. But nobody at the beginning, if somebody had said it was obvious, it wasn't. They couldn't have seen it coming. Nobody could have guessed that it would just collapse, but we had beautiful months where we could do anything. I'll never forget when I was at a Louis Armstrong concert in Lucerna, for example. That's unforgettable. And then at that party at the Semafor Theatre, when we were almost standing on our heads and Armstrong was playing his trumpet. It still gives me the creeps. And experiences like that that stay with you. And then the sadness that suddenly it's gone and it wasn't there anymore. And the ugly seventies were starting. But they were beautiful years."

"Kutná Hora as such, where I have lived since I was born, can be said to have basically not known the Second World War. Kutná Hora was completely uninteresting in terms of war events. There was nothing here, there was no industry here. So the only way one got to know, let's say, the war, so I'm simplifying it a little bit, but the only way one got to know the atmosphere of the world war was, on the one hand, the rationing of food and so on, but mainly how the Jewish families gradually disappeared from the society. Because my parents, my mother and father, had many friends here among the families of Kutná Hora, not only Jewish families. And then it would suddenly happen that, for example, mother and her friend would go to the corso on the square, where they had met Mrs. Hornstein. And she wasn't there anymore. So, according to this disappearance, I say, it's a little bit schematized, so the war, the atmosphere of the war, was felt here like this. I didn't experience it as a one year old boy, but that's what my parents maybe communicated to me afterwards when I was a little bit older."