Petr Louda

"Three of my four grandparents did not speak Czech, so German was spoken at home. I was five years old, I didn't know a peep of Czech. I got acute appendicitis. Acute, so my mother used to take me to the doctors. In Jablonec they didn't recognize it, in Tanvald they admitted me. I didn't speak Czech A or B. So the chief of medicine got angry, invited my parents on the carpet. He must have been an internist and he said: 'Mrs Louda, how come your child doesn't know his mother tongue?' - 'Mr. doctor, the child knows his mother tongue.' - 'Mrs Louda, for God's sake, do you know what country you live in and what year it is? Next year your child will go to first grade and there are no longer two options, Czech and German schools, only Czech schools.' So I had to start kindergarten. But there again the teachers, the communists at that time, also applied the presumption of collective guilt to me. They understood that I wanted to pee after lunch, but they wouldn't let me go to the toilet. When they wouldn't let me, I had to drop it on the floor. In a fortnight or a month, the nursery was over. And my parents had to start speaking Czech to me at home."

"They had a bakery there. That's an interesting thing. My grandmother, a cunning woman, used to send them across the border... because we were in the Third Reich and that was the Protectorate, somewhere between Jablonec and Jenišovice was the border. I know for a fact that Radonovice was already a protectorate and Rychnov was the Sudetenland. There must have been a border somewhere up there. So if you walked from Jablonec to Jenišovice, there was a border somewhere in the middle. And my grandmother used to send my dad and his backpack across the border to relatives to get bread, because they were afraid themselves. And she assumed - my father was never caught - but if the border guards caught a child, they might overlook it, whereas with an adult—even if they were German-speaking bread smugglers and only for their own use, not for profit—it might not. And what was interesting, from what I heard, was that down in Hodkovice, toward the end of the war, there was some kind of camp or prison, though not a concentration camp. Reportedly, there were French and Russian female prisoners there. The girls had found a hole in the fence somewhere—surely the guards must have known about it—and they would go to the bakery to get bread. And for that, the punishment would have been death, had they been caught. My father praised the people of Jenišov, saying that no one ever betrayed anyone."