Jiří Kende

* 1951

  • "When the school wanted us to join the new SSM, which was formed after the Socialist Youth Union broke up, we all said: That's out of the question, nobody will join there. And shortly before graduation, when the school radio announced: 'SSM members, come, I don't know where,' suddenly a third of the class got up, left. They knew that if they didn't get in, they wouldn't be able to study. That's basically how the system, even without the tanks, the Russian tanks, forced people, not forced, but brought people to the point that they just functioned the way the system wanted. For me it was the same. When I was the Thinking Institute, the cadre also wanted me to join the SSM because it wasn't there. I was quite popular with the young people, and since, thank God, the secretary had warned me beforehand that it was going to come to me, I was able to prepare myself a little bit. At that time I started to study economics by distance learning, so I said to the cadre, 'Comrade, I would like to do that, but now I have to study, it would be just for form, and you certainly don't want to do that.' If I did that, of course I would do what he wanted. One had to put on a show. He, of course, couldn't tell me that it would be quite enough for the form. As long as it was based. So I avoided it. And then the one who took over became the head of the department. So that's how it worked under socialism, unfortunately."

  • "It was not clear whether I would get permission in the end. I had friends who had a friend who knitted dresses for ladies in high society. It wasn't that important. What was important was that she was a mistress from the Ministry of the Interior. They told me to go to her, have her make a dress for Gabina and maybe she could help you somehow. She did. We went there, and not only for my wife, but also for my mother-in-law they made a dress. It cost 400 marks at the time, which was a lot of money. Somehow she took us to heart and said: What's going to happen to you? I said I wanted to move out to Gábina, but I don't know if I'll get permission. She said: Wait, let's see, I'll get back to you. And then I heard from her. She said, it was like James Bond: 'Go to the street,' I think it was Spálená Street in Prague, house number, I don't know, 33, 'at that time and take that amount of money with you.' So I went to the street at that time. The door opened, a gentleman came out, said, 'Are you Kende?' I said, 'Yes.' I gave him the envelope, he closed the door again and disappeared. We didn't know what was going to happen. We were waiting. About two months or six Sundays later, the permit came that I could move out. So I moved out to Berlin in 1973."

  • "The political situation was easing, and now we could travel. The trip to America was fantastic. I was looking forward to telling the boys what I had seen. Then I stayed with my cousin, Uncle Victor's son, in Ohio at the university where he was studying. Everyone there wanted me to keep telling them about socialism with a human face, which of course I was happy to do. Then one night I was woken up there. I said, 'Leave me alone, I'll tell you tomorrow.' He said, 'No, no, come and see, the Russians had come to you!' So that was the end of my youth. Then I was walking down a street there on campus and I was crying. I had long hair then, I looked like such a hippie. I got pulled over by the cops. They thought I was on drugs, because nobody walks there, and when somebody walks there like that and cries, and half-dressed... I just said, 'I'm from Czechoslovakia.' They said, 'Sorry.' They apologized and left me alone."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    České Budějovice, 21.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:23:18
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

If the Russians had liberated Terezin a fortnight later, I wouldn‘t be here.

Jiri Kende, 1968
Jiri Kende, 1968
zdroj: Archive of a witness

A descendant of Jews from České Budějovice, Jiří Kende was born on 11 August 1951 in Prague to Viktor and Irena Kende, who survived imprisonment in the Terezín ghetto. One of his grandfathers, Jiří Stadler, perished in Terezín, while the other three grandparents, Vilém and Valerie Kende and Alžběta Stadlerová, were murdered in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. At the end of the war, his mother‘s brother Rudolf Stadler, who was the founder of Klepy, a unique magazine for Jewish youth in the Protectorate, was also killed. Jiří spent his childhood with his older sister Hana in a part of Prague called Little Berlin, where people who had lost everything in the war moved into the apartments vacated by the Germans. While studying at secondary school, he took advantage of the relaxed political situation in the late 1960s. He went to visit his uncle in the United States, where he was later caught up in news of the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. While his sister remained permanently in England, Jiří returned to Prague in 1969. He finished his studies and began to work. In 1973 he met his future wife Gabriele, who had come to Prague from the German Democratic Republic on a sightseeing trip with a group of female students. It didn‘t take long for him to get married and follow her to West Berlin with his emigration passport. There he began to study economics, earning extra money to pay for his studies as a medical assistant in the hospital at night. Before retiring, he worked as the director general of the university library of the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2021 he was living in Berlin with his second wife Petra.