Brno Quotes

If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter—were later used by a neighbour or someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonika. Whether they were ripped from their dining-room tables or hospital beds or from the forest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but—were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed? I couldn't turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness. But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.

Oskar cumplía treinta y siete años, y acababa de abrir una botella de coñac. Sobre su escritorio había un telegrama de una planta de montaje de armamentos situada cerca de Brno. Decía que las granadas antitanques de Oskar estaban tan mal hechas que no soportaban uno solo de los controles de calidad. Estaban mal calibradas, y estallaban durante los ensayos porque no habían sido templadas a la temperatura adecuada. Oskar parecía extasiado con el telegrama. Lo empujó hacia Stern y Pemper para que lo leyeran. Pemper recuerda que dijo una de sus extravagancias: —Es el mejor regalo de cumpleaños que podía haber recibido. Ahora sé que mis productos no pueden matar a ningún pobre infortunado.

He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.

In 1906, the year after Einstein’s annus mirabilis, Kurt Gödel was born in the city of Brno (now in the Czech Republic). Kurt was both an inquisitive child—his parents and brother gave him the nickname der Herr Warum, “Mr. Why?”—and a nervous one. At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis. At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged. Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of 1920s Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

A na řadě byla země moravská. Tatínkovi se tehdy na Moravu nechtělo, pod naší novou chatou na přehradě začali brát cejni. Měli takové malé hubičky, plavali ve vodě stříbročerní a chutnali výborně na sádle s kmínem. Zní to idylicky, ale vždycky jak tyhle potvory začaly žrát, znamenalo to zhoubu pro naši rodinu. Tatínek obvykle přestal pracovat. „Na Moravu pojedeš ty,“ oznámil mi a inženýrovi Jehličkovi sdělil, že já jsem ten pravý obchodník, který udělá na Moravě velkou zakázku. To přesvědčí největší pražský velkoobchod, že i na Moravě půjdou mucholapky na odbyt, a vezmou je pak od nás. Kdyby je tam prodal on, nevěřili by. Něco na tom bylo, ale hlavně v tom byli cejni, velcí jak lopaty. Nevím, podle čeho usuzoval tatínek na mé skvělé obchodní vlastnosti, v životě jsem nic neprodal, jenom jednou za války jedenáct dílů Tarzana, kterého jsem dostal od bratrance Karla Kopřivy, a to mě maminka seřezala bejčákem na psy, když mi k tomu připočetla ještě další kousky a hlavně to, že jsem nenachytal pro kachny v rybníce žáby. Z prodávání jsem měl ohromný strach, nikdy bych si nedovedl počínat jako tatínek a taky jsem nemohl ve svých osmnácti letech vykládat o krásných ženách v Hamburku, ale tatínek se ten strach snažil všemožně rozptýlit. Dal mi ušít bleskově nové modré šaty a objednal mi letenku Praha–Brno. Pak mi vtiskl do ruky knihu Američana Dale Carnegieho Jak získávati přátele a působiti na lidi a řekl mi, že je v ní vše (až po letech se podřekl, že ji nikdy nečetl). Ale pro mě se ta kniha stala po odletu jedinou nadějí. Upjal jsem se k ní tak vášnivě, že jsem ji v pohupech nad Českomoravskou vysočinou i pozvracel. V Brně při návštěvě velkoobchodu jsem třímal aktovku s knihou Dale Carnegieho Jak získávati přátele a působiti na lidi a uvědomoval jsem si jednu z jeho zásad „vždycky se usmívejte“. Další dobrá zásada, kterou jsem si zapamatoval, byla, abych dotyčnému pochválil nějaký vzácný předmět v jeho kanceláři. A tak když jsem se ocitl před starším pánem s knírkem, nezačal jsem hned o mucholapkách, ale usmíval jsem se na celé kolo (jak blbec) a hledal vhodný předmět k pochválení. Usoudil jsem, že to bude v tomto případě nábytek, a tak jsem řekl, jaký má nádherný dubový nábytek. Ten pán se strašně nakrkl a povídal, že je to čirou náhodou smrk a děsný šmejd, vnutila mu ho sem manželka, která ho doma nechce mít, a jestli nechci nic podstatného, abych rychle vypadl. A tak jsem vypad, o vzácných mucholapkách BOMBA-CHEMIK se neodvažuje říct ani slovo.

While the mechanistic understanding of the cancer cell remained suspended in limbo between viruses and chromosomes, a revolution in the understanding of normal cells was sweeping through biology in the early twentieth century. The seeds of this revolution were planted by a retiring, nearsighted monk in an isolated abbey in Brno, Austria, who bred pea plants as a hobby. In the early 1860s, working alone, Gregor Mendel had identified a few characteristics in his purebred plants that were inherited from one generation to the next—the color of the pea flower, the texture of the pea seed, the height of the pea plant.

Home isn’t where one grows up; don’t make the mistake of thinking that. Home is where they welcome you when you walk in the door. And that’s something none of us here in Brno have experienced.

After the liberation, when the American Army freed me—I was working in a Nazi slave-labor camp—I went back to our home in Brno. I looked for my family. But they were all dead. Then I looked for the families of my friends. Judith, dear, it grieves me to tell you that your family, too, were all exterminated.

Newark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto Rico. For a while, after leaving Newark, he’d contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech glove factory in Brno.