Best of One on One in 2002
Over the course of the year we have interviewed a great many interesting and unusual people in our popular weekly slot called One on One. For this special programme we have put together some of the best bits of the most memorable interviews broadcast in 2002.
We begin with Jan Wiener, a former RAF pilot, prisoner-of-war and amateur boxer, who was forced to flee Czechoslovakia in 1939. As a 19-year-old Jewish teenager, Jan was running for his life. His mother had been sent to Auschwitz, his father was planning to commit suicide. Before he left the country, he was forced to make a list of all the possessions he wanted to take with him. Now in his 80s, Jan Wiener recalled to Rob Cameron the moment he submitted the list to the authorities.
"The official there was a Czech. His name was Bohumil Havranek, he was a collaborator and a racist, and he was very sarcastic and cruel. He said - 'Jew - four shirts? No, one shirt.' And every item where I had three or four, he crossed it out and said only one'. And then he came to the shoes, and six years later that nearly cost him his life. He said - Jew(but he used the bad word zidaku', like kike')four pairs of shoes?' he said - You won't have time to wear out one.' Well, I survived the war, and I had a burning desire to kill this man. To take revenge on this man. I had a burning desire, a white flame - I saw it with my eyes, that flame inside me. I was so full of that hatred that I told our co-pilot, and when we returned here [in 1945], after the first night we met, and he said to me - Jan, have you made up your mind to kill this man? Go and kill him good.' So I went there, and my heart was beating in the hope that he was still alive, so that I could kill him. I had a Colt revolver, 9mm. I took off the safety. I knocked at the door, he said - Come in', and I went in. He saw a man in uniform, like himself, and he came around the table wanting to shake hands with me. But I refused. Then he said - What can I do for you?' I said - Do you recognise me?' He said - I don't seem to have the honour.' I said - Havranek, I will refresh your memory. Listen carefully.' And I went through the list as I remembered it, and when I came to the shoes, I said - Now you have to pay special attention. Four pairs of shoes - Jew, you won't have time to wear out one. And you know what Havranek? I wore out six. And I came to kill you.' I pulled him by his lapels towards me and his face was right in my face, sweating. His upper lip had a little moustache, and it was quivering. And out of fear he had lost his voice, and he croaked - Please don't - I have family.' And that was for me like in the theatre, when the curtain goes upWhat are you doing here? You're about to kill a man who cannot defend himself in cold blood. You cannot do that. So I hit him very hard with a right cross, right over his nose, and broke his nose. I felt the nose breaking and he fell on the table, and he was in la-la land. Then I went away. On the staircase I had a wave of enormous happiness that I had not done it! And that was the moment when World War Two ended for me."
Iva Pekarkova is a well-known Czech writer whose books have been published in English and German and include Truck Stop Rainbows and Gimme the Money, the latter based on her experience of driving a taxi cab in New York City for three years. Jan Velinger had a chance to meet Iva in September and they discussed not only how she began writing and but also how her father feared her passion would get her into trouble under the communists:
"I think I was maybe three or four years old and I just felt like I had to write down what was happening at the moment and of course I couldn't really write, so my grandmother would tell me the letters one by one and then I would write my diaries that way. But, it wasn't very serious at that time and nothing got really published yet. (laughs) But then, I think I was thirteen or fourteen and I started feeling like I want to write down what's happening around me and other people... I think this was because we lived at a time when we felt like we had to do some kind of documentation - let's say if you could get hold of a 1968 newspaper it was a great thing for us, so we felt like we should keep this information somehow. So, I think this was the first impulse, and I was really lucky because my father, who is a physicist and who wanted me to be a biologist and have some kind of safe politics-free kind of job, he just absolutely hated the idea that I am trying to write. He would lock away the typewriter from me, and yell and scream at me tell me I'm gonna go to jail if I keep writing like this, so of course, being a rebellious child, I did whatever I could to write, so, I should thank my father for actually helping me."
Here Iva speaks about an early story she wrote, mocking the communist regime, which attained a kind of life of its own:
"When I was maybe seventeen, eighteen, I wrote a kind of strange but I think also funny little story, or novella you can call it, which was titled "Double Sex is the Motto", which was about how the government decided to make everyone a hermaphrodite, so that all people would be perfectly equal under communism. And of course I wrote it and typed it several times, with several copies, but then of course I couldn't sign it because I suppose then I would go to jail, or at least be expelled from my school. Then, one day, I am hitch-hiking some place and these two guys picked me up and we were going to Prague and they were telling me about this story and laughing, and I didn't tell them I was the one who wrote it. But, I thought this was the best criticism I ever got of anything I have ever written."
Sa-el Shunk Manitu was Ian Willoughby's guest in April. An American Indian of the Lakotah, or Sioux, people he came to Prague not long after the Velvet Revolution and - among other things - ran restaurants and wrote the screenplay of the film Marian'. Here, Ian asks Sa-el Shunk Manitu whether he was 'exotic' to Czech people.
"Any Indian is quite exotic, but being what they call Soox' we are quote "the real Indians", which is sort of sad, because they got it from films. It's great, you shoot guys on horses with feathers and bow and arrows and wide screen!"
I know there is a tradition of Czech people dressing up as Indians
"It's more than even that.that's a difficult one for me, because I have a little problem with that. Originally there was a group here called A Thousand Teepees, and I think they're still here, and they went out into the woods in the summer. The one time I went there were already 20-something teepees up and there were still more to go. They all take Indian names, tribal names. Some of them speak a little Lakotah, and that's pretty hard. Where do you find Lakotah? Some them know thank you', hello'"
They learn it from books?
"They have to had, but I don't where they would have found it. I mean, it's pretty well done."
How do they react to you?
"Oh, that's part of the problem, because I don't want to be their myth. They don't have good information, because they have it all from books like Karl May with Winnetu and all of this foolnishness in films. It's totally convoluted their knowledge, it's not real. But then you get a real Indian among them, and I can understand how some people have become gods in this world."
Sadly Sa-el Shunk Manitu passed away not long after returning to the United States in the summer.
Literary translator Gerry Turner first came to Prague in 1971 to work for the World Federation of Trade Unions, and stayed in the city for the whole of the decade. When Ian Willoughby spoke to Gerry Turner in April, he asked him whether he had much contact with other foreigners in Prague at that time.
"One came across the English speakers because there were so few native English speakers that if there was any need for English teaching work or recordings in English, the few who were here were called on. I got to know a lot of the BBWs, so-called, the British Born Wives who came after 1945 to follow their Czech husbands, and some splendid characters among them."
Did you enjoy those ten years?
"I think they were the best ten years of my life, because I was faced with a completely new reality. There was a time warp' sense, of going back even to my childhood in England in the 1950s. Things had just been preserved here like a fly in amber since the Communist takeover, in many ways. Vaclav Havel often talks about the sense of historyless-ness', which in a way is, if you like, attractive, particularly when so much of what was happening in the early 70s was just shoddy. Whatever was called progress then was fairly shoddy."
Was it the case that the Communist authorities didn't consider you suspect because you worked for the trade union organisation?
"Obviously, that was my cover. In many ways it meant that I could associate with who I liked, more or less. Obviously the secret police were interested in everything, but they did not choose to provoke the foreign comrades. And very shortly after my arrival I was lucky enough to meet people from the arts world in Prague. That was good because I was forced to learn Czech very fast, very few people had much English in those days. I was able to meet those who stood out against the regime and made very firm friendships that have lasted right up to now. In spite of the many restrictions on people's lives at the time, we were able to have a very good time together."
Petr Zelenka is a film maker whose movies enjoy almost cult status among viewers in the Czech Republic: in October Jan Velinger spoke to Petr about the FAMU film Academy in Prague, as well as his choice between becoming a scriptwriter and doing something else entirely:
"The choice was mathematics or arts, mathematics or scriptwriting, basically. And I have chosen scriptwriting because my parents are such a good example. Also, I thought that it would be very creative. But I consider mathematics as very creative as well, so... I wanted to be free, independent on the outside world, you know, independent on reality, which both mathematics and arts are..."
What were years at FAMU like? The film academy here in Prague...
"FAMU gives you time to think about whatever you want to think about. It doesn't teach you anything., which was quite cruel, you know, regarding these professors there. But it was probably true that we learned more from criticising each other from a small group of students - there were five of us - than from actual professors. So it gave us time and it gave us sort of a small family in which we criticised each other, and that was a good, good lesson. "
Did you for instance meet people from technical spheres: cameramen, editors, that sort of thing?
"You know we were almost sort of forbidden to meet these people. At that point scriptwriting was one of eight departments, but it was completely out of everything, you know. It was locked away, so we were not supposed to do anything practical. We were not supposed to touch the camera or the editing table or film stock. We were supposed to write only and write. At the point where we studied at FAMU this began to change because Jan Hrebejk, my schoolmate there, a scriptwriter also [director of the Oscar-nominated Divided We Fall -editor's note], made his own small film based on my short story, and he won sort of a student competition there. And that was surprising that two scriptwriters can make a film, you know, and win something."
With three feature films completed Petr Zelenka graduated from writing to both writing and directing, and this year's The Year of the Devil took top prize at the Karlovy Vary International film festival. How does he feel about the stories he tells, specifically, the characters he brings into the world?
"I try to feel compassion for my characters and I consider them unique people and unique human beings. That's what I want to feel about my characters, I want to know that he or she is unique. That was what made The Buttoners rather popular here, this belief that every small person is unique. The audience can identify with a guy that's really special but just like everybody else."
Many of your characters fail in love - now I'm thinking specifically I guess of this character Midge from your play Tales of Common Insanity. What does it say about our sexuality because he's going to extremes to satisfy basic sexual needs - is this the fate of the failed Romantic, the person that has been burned by love that ultimately has to turn to objects to satisfy this huge loneliness?
"I think it's just a tease, you know, I don't think this aspect is important about this character, it's just a vehicle for us to focus on him. I think his main problem is that he mistakes women for God's messengers, mistakes women for angels. And it's his twisted idea of God, you know, and women being a part of God's language. This misinterpretation of religion, you know, when you don't believe in God and you believe in women as such... that, that can really screw you up."
Jarka Stuchlikova has spent some 30 years of her life abroad. When she spoke to Ian Willoughby in August, Mrs Stuchlikova told him about the unusual place where she and her husband lived in Chile.
"We were living in a market town among the Indian reservations. My husband did social research field work in anthropolgy among the Machupe Indians. It was more or less medieval conditions. There was electricity from eight to ten, from a village generator, which was clapping in the distance. Water was from the well, and in the garden there were cactuses and orange trees. Everything was handled on horseback or in ox carts, so it was in a way an idyllic childhood for my children. They disappeared in the morning and we never knew where they were."
How old were they at the time?
"They were young, they were four and five. They had so much freedom that even now they are longing for it."
After Chile, Jarka Stuchlikova moved to Northern Ireland with her academic husband, and ended up spending a quarter of a century there. Was she - as a foreigner - able to get on with both Catholics and Protestants?
"I was, I was. While I was a foreigner and I was never, obviously trying to be something else, in my house for example Catholics and Protestants were together, and some people who would never have had a chance to meet in their lives. I was able to go to Anderstown and to East Belfast, to Newtownards Road. I was never worried, never afraid, because it was enough if I opened my mouth, my accent would give me away."
In March Rob Cameron interviewed Marius Dragomir, a Romanian journalist who lives and works in the Czech Republic. Marius began his career in the heady days that followed the 1989 overthrow of the Ceausescu regime, interviewing Michael Jackson and Tom Jones for his local paper when he was still at school. Here he recalls a scary encounter with a pack of Bucharest's notorious wild dogs.
"I lived for a while in Bucharest, before going to Slovakia. I have to say this - I lived in a very bad area, in a very bad district, full of dogs. I was coming home from work one night, and I was surrounded by a pack of 17 dogs - I can remember because I counted them because I couldn't believe it. I was really scared, I've never been so scared in my life. I tried to run, they came after me, and I was stuck between two parked cars, and I had to jump on one of the cars just to get rid of them. And then some of my friends said - well it's clear, if you live in such a district you need a gun.' It was not a gun with real bullets, just an air gun. And they gave me their gun, just to have it, just in case. And I remember one night I used it. I was coming back home from work, and again the same dogs, and it was 1 o'clock in the morning. Usually in Romania, in Bucharest, especially at night, people were celebrating, dancing outside, lots of shops were open late, the streets were very busy. So the dogs came after me, and I remembered I had the gun with me. I took it out and I just shot one of the doggies. He started to run, and all of the other dogs went after him and just crushed him. Just beat him to death."
In May Jan Velinger spoke to John Caulkins, an American who has lived in Prague since 1990 and runs the popular Duende cafe just a few hundred metres from the Vltava river. As John revealed, all kinds of clientele have visited, including even one famous Czech singer:
"We really do have a diverse clientele, you know, we have the garbage men who are picking up the garbage and they run in and have a quick beer between garbage cans, and then we'll have some ambassadors and top executives and the occasional celebrity, so it's nice, and plus we have the ex-pats and tourists and, uh, you know, the young Italian kids, they steal all our ashtrays and take them home as souvenirs, but, it's turned out the way we planned, we wanted it to be a kind of peoples' kind of place and very eclectic and so far we've accomplished that."
There's a rumour going around town that famous Czech singer Karel Gott recently visited Duende, and apparently you sang a duet together. What's the story behind that?
"Yeah, well, in fact he was there for a book signing event and all the paparazzi were there and it was really a scene. And, I worked up the nerve, when he came back for the 2nd time later that evening, to go over and ask him what he liked form American music. And of course he's a great crooner, he has a great voice, and he's a nice man, so I asked what do you like of these songs how about Roy Orbison (sings) Crying over you as only Karel Gott could do it, but he quickly cut me off before we got past that, because, it was his show and he's famous, and he's, he's always aware that people are watching him. But, he's a very nice man and it was fun meeting him."
"There is a strange word in Russian called taska'. There's no equivalent in any language under the sun. It means something like an awakened emptiness, a sense of emptiness. I think I picked up this taska bug in Russia, and it didn't leave for me ages. Of course when I fell in love with [my partner] Lacka it seemed to disappear, but then it seemed to bite me back even when I was a teacher, this vacant feeling in the evenings, what is the meaning of life and so on. And I had this in 1997, just before the floods. I thought what's the purpose of existence' and so on and so forth. And that's when events brought to me to the Roma, and magic happened, and I have been completely cured of the taska bug in my life. I hope it won't return!"
And several months ago Kumar's landmark "Coexistence Village" project, a village where white and Roma families live side-by-side, finally came to fruition.
