Adolf Munk and Olga Munkova

This is a picture of my parents, Adolf Munk and Olga Munkova, nee Nachodova. It was taken in 1923. I don't think that my mother and father were suited to each other very much. My mother was never very satisfied with her life. She didn't like small town life and constantly yearned to escape from Brandys. Sometimes she'd take off on our father by taxi to Prague. Apparently she very much liked to go to cafés there. Our father was the complete opposite. He longed for peace and quiet, more or less like me. I've inherited more of my father's personality than my mother's. Though our father had bad legs, he liked going for walks. He always took the dog, who was named Rek, and took the road through the fields in the direction of a village named Zapy. Occasionally he took me with him, or walked with our family doctor, Dr. Laufer. Back then there weren't any cars yet, and so they walked along the road and discussed the international situation. I don't exactly know what my father's political opinions were like, but someone told me that he was a social democrat. Dr. Laufer was Father's closest friend, who he saw the most of all. The doctor had a very famous brother, who before the war was such a famous sports reporter, that the Germans left him alone during the whole war. While he was also from a mixed marriage, what helped him most of all was his famous name from before the war. He commented all the important soccer games on the radio. However, his brother, Father's closest friend and our family doctor, went with his entire family to Auschwitz. Besides walks, Father liked carpentry and also painted. In the laundry room he had a completely equipped carpentry workshop. In his spare time he made all sorts of things, small items of furniture, chairs, tables. He obviously enjoyed it very much. It was a source of amusement for all our friends and relatives, because Father used to give them his finished products as gifts. Father also painted. He'd shut himself up in the attic, where he had an easel, and through a window a view out over the Polabi landscape. There he'd paint mainly genre paintings. When I was a child, he drew soldiers and horses for me. He drew and painted beautifully. We also inherited some basic artistic talent from him, and my brother later also further devoted himself to it. My sister longed to be a fashion designer all her life, and even our mother drew nicely, but we didn't make use of it in any particular fashion.

Photos from this interviewee