An Overcrowded Local Train to Kukla Mine
During the Second World War, there was a labour concentration camp affiliated to Kukla mine in Oslavany. Among the prisoners who were interned here for forced labour was also a Czech architect of German-Jewish origin named Pavel Spielmann. His son Petr and wife Leopoldina were among those, who regularly visited their relatives in the camp - every Sunday, they would come by an overcrowded local train from Brno. Petr Spielmann recalls that there were so many people heading to Oslavany, that they could hardly fit in the train. When the train reached a hill, everyone had to get off and scale the hill on foot; the train waited for them on the top and from there they continued. The return trip was the same. “We used to visit the group of miners my father worked with, but we never actually got to see him,” Petr Spielmann recalls; “I was nine at that time and I remember that once we saw my father and waved to him…” Luckily, Mr. Spielmann’s father managed to survive the war and the entire family happily re-united in May 1945.
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Petr Spielmann
Petr Spielmann was born on the 11th of October 1932. Spielmann's father came from a Czech-German family, his mother was Czech with Moravian roots, and before his birth, Petr's parents lived in Dresden. Upon the creation of the Weimar Republic, they were forced to return to Czechoslovakia - they settled down in Northern Bohemia, Petr was born in Ústí nad Labem. During World War II he was supposed to join a transport because of his second-degree mixed origin, but his mother saved him. He spent the end of the war with his relatives in the Moravian countryside. After the war the family moved to Prague. After graduating from grammar school, Petr Spielmann went to study the history of art at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. He soon got in touch with the artistic community, especially at the House of Art. After completing his studies he began work at the Brno Municipal Museum, later switching to the National Gallery in Prague. In 1957 he married and started a family. Towards the end of the Sixties, he functioned as the union chairman of the National Gallery, and after the occupation he received an offer of employment at the Bochum Museum in Germany. He decided to move abroad with his wife and son. He was declared an emigrant in 1971. After the death of the curator of the Bochum Museum, Petr Lee, Spielmann became his successor. He led the Bochum Museum until 1997, buying over 1200 items into its collections from Czechoslovak artists, including emigrant artists. Since 1997 he has lived alternately in Bochum and in Brno. From 2004 to 2007 he was the dean of the Brno Faculty of Fine Arts.
