Richard Novák

“As soon as the end of the war came… if it had taken some time - but it was immediately, immediately, the people immediately felt that the pressure would subside, that the Germans were no longer threatening them and that the Gestapo was not ever present anymore. Clashes ensued. One day, it was about three days later after May 9th, a group of German refugees appeared on the road from Slavonice. Several old men, but mainly women and children. They were led by one robust woman. She had a certificate from the mayor of Slavonice. His name was Augustýn, he was formerly a worker from the brick factory in Vydří. He was thus well-known in Vydří. They came and they explained to the prior that Augustýn had sent them and that he asked him to let them spend the night in the arcades of the cloister and also to give them some food, because they were then to continue their journey all the way to Jihlava. But see what happened: well, they were indeed in a poor state, they were a desolate group of people. There was a camp kitchen, and our mom thus cooked a kettle of soup for them. They prepared accommodation for them, I think that there were still some straw mattresses there. There was straw left behind by German soldiers who had been there as sappers and who had been accommodated in the German school. What happened: some youths from the village came there at night, claiming that they were Germans, and they picked this large woman who led the group. They were carrying her around on a wagon and beating her and showing what heroes they were. It was nasty, those people were desolate, nobody knew whether they had murdered somebody or sent somebody to gas chambers. They even had that letter, the certificate, from the mayor.”

“Well, people now say how bad it is. But see, back then, even the top soloists’ salaries were poor. We did not mind, because we wanted to do it when it was possible, but nobody earned significantly more money. There was a rule that when I was a guest singer in some theatre, I was allowed to receive a compensation which was thirty percent of my salary, and therefore the decisive factor was what my own theatre was paying me. When I sang in a concert, the rate was twenty percent. So one of the things that happened was that I sang during the Prague Spring with the Czech Philharmonic and I had twenty percent of my salary, and thus I received 760 Crowns for my singing. Next to me there was a German baritone from the West, who sang for seventy thousand during that evening. He told us that he felt very sorry about it, and he said that they did not know what to do about it because they were not able to do anything.”