Ing. Zdeněk Skála

* 1953

  • "I was completely indoctrinated by my father. Emotionally and factually only in the family area. So I read about it. But it wasn't difficult. You are a bit younger, but for example, in those days, Zweig was usually in the libraries, both Zweigs, and you could read that. There were an awful lot of those Jewish authors. I was naively leftist, not that I was in the SSM, I never was, but I was naively leftist and I reflected that the communists were not naively leftist, that they had nothing to do with it at all. But I read such things, and of course many of the authors were Jews. Also naively leftists, but they suffered more. Or not me, them. As far as I remember, I started going to the town late. I used to call it work, that we were cemetery Jews. When my father was in Prague, he went to the cemetery every Sunday, to see his mother. He never got rid of it, he felt guilty to death that he had left his mother here."

  • "That was nice. When my grandfather sorted it out like this, to Denmark and to Palestine, truly as Švejk he told them: 'And after the war in Prague.' Which is paradoxical because they really declared themselves Jews and my father was a Zionist. But Masaryk’s deception was so perfect that they also thought of themselves as Czechoslovak patriots. So after the war in Prague. So they were in Prague after the war, waiting for my grandfather to return."

  • "At first, I did it as a volunteer, right after the revolution I secured a synagogue, but statically. There was this big project, it was called 16 stars, which dealt with the reconstruction of Jewish monuments. Jirka Daníček was in charge, and they knew me, so they dragged me into it. I was a technical geek there. It was excellent. It worked, but luckily I'm out of it now. It’s absolutely exhausting. This was European money, so they had to ensure sustainability, but it worked, the buildings were restored. But that idea is a little off. Jirka is a person who takes care of those monuments. It's nice that the roots are here, that the Jews are not a drift, that they didn't appear here from nowhere, that they were here. It's good as an argument against Bartoš, who wouldn't listen to the argument anyway. That's the kind of thing it is. But those buildings are dead. No Jews will appear in those buildings. There is a synagogue in Mikulov. These are normal buildings, that building is a normal building, Jews have no consecration, deconsecration. Simply, if there is a Torah in that building, then that house has some status. But it can be your building, we climb up to your castle and you have a synagogue out of it. Watch out for us. And because there are those wonder-rabbis, at the cemetery in Mikulov, to whom Hasidim from all over the world gather, they bring you the Torah there for some holiday, they let them in, and there is nothing else there."

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    Praha, 31.08.2020

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The hardest hit was when I realized that I wasn‘t really Jewish

Zdeněk Skála in 2020
Zdeněk Skála in 2020
zdroj: Paměť národa

Zdeněk Skála was born on December 11, 1953 in Prague. He comes from a Czech-Jewish family. He considers both identities important to him, but due to his turbulent history, he particularly reflects on his Jewishness. His father Josef Skála was a Zionist and emigrated to Palestine with his father Bruno and stepmother Hedvika before the war. He then went to a foreign army, fought at Tobruk and Dunkirk. The witness‘s father considered emigrating again in 1948, but Czech patriotism prevailed and he and his parents remained in Czechoslovakia. Zdeněk Skála graduated from grammar school and then from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at CTU. He worked as a designer all his life. From a young age he was involved in the Prague Jewish community, after the revolution he participated in the repair of some Jewish monuments. In 1989, he helped establish the Civic Forum in Prague‘s Suchdol, where he also served as a representative for many years. Together with his wife Adriana, they help out at the non-profit organisation Cesta Domů (“Way Home”). In 2020, Zdeněk Skála still lived in Prague-Suchdol.