An unhappy hotelier
The name of the famous luxury hotel Alcron is derived from the first letters of the name of its owner - Alois Krofta. In addition to Alcron, Krofta also owned the Flóra hotel, where by the end of the 1940s, Irena Šimonová worked as an employee directly subordinated to Krofta. According to her memories, the hotelier faced an unfortunate fate: "He was an extremely decent man. He employed me although he knew that I was a student and he didn't mind it. He fared badly, because the Communists took everything he had. After the February Coup, the situation changed fundamentally in the hotel. In every private enterprise, you suddenly had an initiative comrade who was ready to take over business. In Krofta's hotel, the stoker Novák turned out to be that comrade. At first, they confiscated Krofta's hotels, then his flat and finally they took everything that was in his private cellars." Nevertheless, Krofta remained in the top management of the hotels until 1949. He decided to get on well with the regime and joined the Communist Party. "Every morning, when the director came to work, he would sit down next to me and began to justify himself in front of me. He would try to explain to me why he had joined the party after February. He told me everything that was on his heart. And when he was done, he said: 'that's enough' and he went away." However, the libation to the regime was not enough. Although the Alcron hotel further prospered, it stood in the shadow of the emerging new hotels and began to lose its glamour. Krofta died in May 1958. According to the testimony of his former colleagues, he was by then a physically and mentally broken man.
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Irena Šimonová
Irena Šimonová, née Vlachová, was born in Ivanov on December 9, 1929. Both of her parents came from wealthy families, their marriage was not happy and they got divorced in 1945. Irena grew up in Vyškov, where she experienced WWII and the subsequent liberation of the city by the Red Army. Due to the unsatisfactory situation in the family after the divorce of her parents, Irena moved to Prague where she - as an underage - was placed under the supervision of her father's friend, a retired lawyer, Dr. Pekuláš. At that time, she studied at the People's University. During her studies, she met František Smrček, with whom she maintained a very strong, albeit on her part only a friendly relationship. After Smrček emigrated to West Germany in 1948, Irena got involved in illegal activities with Smrček's help, trying to help people who were threatened with persecution by the communist regime. In March 1949, she tried to cross the border in the region of Šumava, (Bohemian Forest). However, the smuggler abandoned Irena in the woods and the escape failed. On her return journey by train to Prague on March 21, 1949, she was arrested. After harsh interrogations in St. Bartholomew Street in Prague, a secret trial with "Irena Vlachová and companions" took place on Christmas 1949, in which she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She was placed in a prison in Prague’s Pankrác and in 1951 she was sent to work in a brick factory in Červené Pečky. From there, along with other inmates, she unsuccessfully tried to escape to West Germany. She got caught by the police and was sentenced to another three years on top of her original sentence. She was placed in the Pardubice prison, where her fellow inmates counted "celebrities" like Růžena Vacková, Dagmar Šimková, Jiřina Štěpničková, Julie Hrušková and others. Irena Šimonová was released during an amnesty in 1960. She went to her mother in Carlsbad and lived there until 1968. She married and started a family. During the Prague Spring, she got involved in the establishment of the KAN in Carlsbad. In August 1968, she emigrated with her husband to the Netherlands. Here she founded a successful company doing business in the clothing and fashion industry. Today she alternately lives in Prague and in the Netherlands.
