An unhappy hotelier

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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.

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Prague 1, Štěpánská 624

Available in: English | Česky

The Alcron Hotel was built in 1932 by the engineer and architect Alois Krofta. The name of the hotel is derived from the initial letters of his name. Although at that time there was a general economic crisis, the newly built luxury hotel was not affected by it and was able to be prosperous. The reason for this was that the hotel was unique in Prague - there was no comparable accommodation to be found anywhere else in the city. The hotel used the most modern and progressive achievements of state-of-the-art technology, for example four passenger elevators, machine dishwashing, underground parking, a special electrical signaling system, top-of-the-line refrigeration equipment, an automatic fire-extinguishing system and a hotel for dogs on its rooftop. In its heyday, the Alcron Hotel was the go-to place for famous artists, movie stars, statesmen, spies and the wealthy elite of Prague. In the 1960s, various news agencies were seated here the first report about the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was broadcasted abroad from here. The hotel and its guests were under the surveillance of the StB. The secret service even invented special ashtrays for eavesdropping, which were placed in the hotel rooms and called Alcron. At the end of the communist era, the fame of the Alcron waned. It was only thanks to a new owner in 1998, who restored the hotel to its original art deco style, that the hotel was able to survive.

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An unhappy hotelier

Irena Šimonová