Josef Horčic

“And the reasons, when they were sought, so it was in tolerance and freedom of thinking of the German organizers to handle the Olympic Games in such a peaceful and friendly atmosphere. And they did not want to restrict the athletes in the sense they´d remind them of the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. So as for the security the Olympics were relatively worse than some Olympics in Mexico, Tokyo and so on. To give you a concrete example, here is a legitimation or a pass to an Olympic village without any code to secure it was not forged and so on. You just had it like that and you could get in. If you needed to stop, then you had to show this card where you could actually change photos without any problems. At the other Olympics, everything was encoded much better and so on.”

“So I would like to go back to the history of my father, who spent decades studying at high schools in Prague from 1939 until 1950. He was one of those students, who were taken to concentration camps on 17th November, 1939. There they had to work the profession they knew. My dad was a developer by then. So I have his index and his letters from the concentration camps, from which I know what he has been through for the past ten years. And that knowledge that I gained later and which my father did not directly tell me, so my feelings were strong enough in the sense that I did not realize throughout my life, what problems he actually had and what happened during those ten years. Because he got married after returning from the concentration camp, he had already two children in the 1945, and then he was still studying and completing his studies. In 1949 his wife died. And at that moment, before graduating from college, he left the communist party in 1950 and refused to take the exam of... now I do not know what it was called - it was either political economy or something like that. So he did not complete college studies, he was fired from work, and had to look after two children as a widower.”