Ing. Pavel Hořák

"My dad actually saved my mom by asking her to marry him in November 1941, even though he wasn't allowed to do so under the Nuremberg Laws, which were already in force in the Protectorate at that time. But there was a brave official at the office in Vinohrady who said, 'I'll marry you anyway.' And he did. That made it a mixed marriage. And according to German rules, slightly different conditions applied to her than to the rest of her family. Her family—her mother, father, grandmother, sister, and her sister's husband—went to Terezín sometime in June 1942 and were sent somewhere to Poland within a week. We don't even know for sure if it was to Auschwitz or somewhere else. They all perished. My mother didn't go to Terezín until early February 1945 because she was in a mixed marriage, and she survived those three months until liberation. Paradoxically, my father went to the concentration camp earlier than my mother, in the fall of 1944, because he had married a Jewish woman. He was in Germany, but at the end of the war he was sent to Dresden to help clear the rubble after the bombing. From what I have heard, he managed to escape. He stole a motorcycle somewhere and somehow fought his way back to Prague on it, and on May 9, 1945, he managed to return to Prague. My mother actually returned on the same day, but a little earlier than my father. Although there was a quarantine in Terezín because of typhus, she and another friend decided that they had been through enough, so they packed up and left. A Czech policeman who told them, 'I shouldn't let you go, ladies, but I'll just turn around and pretend I didn't see you,' let them leave. So they hitchhiked and got a truck drive them to Prague."

“And Marcela was still living with us at that time. It’s a bit complicated to explain. We called her our sister, but she wasn’t actually our sister. She was a Jewish child whom my mother had met during the war, before she herself went to Terezín. She worked in a Jewish institution, like an orphanage, so when the orphanage was closed and most of the children were also sent to Terezín, my mother took Marcela in, or more precisely, to my paternal grandmother. Marcela actually survived the war, and after the war, no one claimed her. None of her relatives were found, so she stayed with us. We called her our sister, but she wasn't really our sister, and my parents never adopted her, but she stayed with us until she grew up."

"At that time, the staff asked me if I would agree to go to France instead of Africa, which I initially thought was just a prank on me, but they actually meant it. They were in a hurry, so I didn't even take all the compulsory courses that existed at the time. Actually, I was just taking a French exam, which fortunately didn't bother me, and an interview, completely formal, and I quickly went there. The arrival there was quite interesting in the sales department, then the sales department was separate from the political part of the Czechoslovak embassy, so I was welcomed by the business council as my boss. I was there as a delegate. At that time, we did not yet have diplomatic status, that was the status of a sales man. And he greeted me with the words, 'You're not in the party, I don't know that you have an uncle pushing you through. Otherwise, all the young people go to Asia first, to Africa, and you're here as a young man in France, and you're probably going to work for another ministry.' By that he meant that I was a secret police officer being sent out that way, because it was weird that I did not meet all the conditions. Of course, it offended me a little, but on the other hand, the idea or the information spread quickly, so it helped me a little. The others were a little afraid of me, so I used it a little."

"My mother also went through the period when there was a typhus epidemic in Terezín, where all the death marches returned or took place, where the Germans drove everyone from the east from Poland to the West and they came all miserable to Terezín and brought with them typhus too. The mother cared for them, she was intended to treat these people, but when Terezín was liberated and the Red Army came there, quarantine was announced, but the mother and one of her friends got together and fled. As they were leaving Terezín, a Czech policeman was standing there, supposedly to tell them, 'Miss, I must not let you go.' And then he said, 'But you know what, I have to look that way right now.' So he let them pass. So they gradually arrived in Prague and their parents met there. So I would say mathematically nine months after that meeting, my older brother was born."

"Every day early in the morning around four o´clock, there was a so-called briefing, when the organizers went again through the route of the stage of the day, and pointed out all possible tricks, traps that are there, and changes compared to the itinerary. Because in Africa, when the wind was blowing, where there was a big dune, it was somewhere else the next week, so some roads didn't go very well. When we were there for the first time, of course it was in the open air, so it wasn't very easy to understand and hear, so we always only gathered half of what they told us. So then I had the idea that functioned terribly well, then everyone used it. Fortunately, I don't know how we figured it out, I had a small dictaphone with me, so I always went to the oven or the amplifier, I put the dictaphone there and recorded everything they said about the day. I didn't wake the navigators at all in the morning to be there with me, and then we locked ourselves in the cabin and I played it and dictated to them the details they wrote down in the itinerary so they knew. And of course, when I didn't understand, the dictaphone allowed me to re-play it, maybe two or three times, to could really understand."