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Among those people who took care to save our lives I should mention in first place Dr. Oldrich Navara and his brave wife Jirinka. Navara constantly reported to the Gestapo on our catastrophic physical condition and insisted that we were not capable to be transported. He paid off the Polizeimeister with alcohol and also the cruel boss of the prisoner Soppa whose trust he managed to keep. Particularly Jirinka Navarova knew how to handle Soppa; she pretended to be interested in his family and his work and took part in drinking parties which Soppa loved. At one such party she for example told him that I was her relative and also the lawyer who stood by her during her divorce from her first husband and that she was worried lest Navara found out about it because he was always jealous of anyone close to her. Navara was sure to send me away from Pankrac if he knew all that because he was so terribly jealous of anyone who came close to her. Apparently Soppa then pompously announced that as long as he was director of the Pankrac prison I would not leave the hospital no matter what Navara did! A while later Navara was already telling us the story and at his house Jirinka told it to our wives whom Jirinka used to invite for dinner occasionally though Zdenek and I were worried about such practices and protested against it. But Jirinka was courageous and quite often acted with a certain amount of bravura.
It’s terrible for me to think that both these wonderful Navaras who during the war had done so much good had later suffered for it. First by the hand of the Nazis, who eventually discovered how Jirinka and the doctor had fooled them, but also the Communists, who couldn’t forgive them that they stood by Dr. Drtina against the cruelties in which the Communists equalled the Nazis. [Dr. Jaroslav Drábek]