From Bohuslav Hynek's book Diplomat in African Switzerland.
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During a brief farewell - Alison Smale of the Associated Press was waiting for me behind my back - before my departure to Harare, the journalist, then a resistance fighter, currently Minister Dienstbier, whom I have admired all my adult life, praised me for having visited Archbishop Tomášek and the Slovak Matrix as part of my pre-departure preparations, but was not happy about missing the meeting with the directors of Omnipol and Desty Děčín.
In the former Rhodesia, Czech hunting guns are in vogue. I myself had one rifle sent to Ladislav Kropacek. They didn't have the one he wanted, so they sent another one. Lad'a told me it was only good for an elephant. He registered it quickly so he could resell it. Hunters called Czech rifles and shotguns Brno rifles. True, I don't know what kind of gun he used to shoot at game on weekends, but for a bottle of whiskey, or just for fun, the immunity-protected U.S. ambassador, I was never there; it may also have come from our gun factory when he picked up his second wife in the American Czech community.
From Desty come the forklifts at the second largest tobacco exchange in the world in Harare; the first by volume is in NewYork. I was at that exchange, I was a spectator at the auction, I didn't understand anything. The caller spoke so fast and unintelligibly to me that I soon gave up. But I was invited to a party to celebrate the announcement of the winner of The Tobacconist of The Year 1991. It was, to my delight, a German-speaking lady of Jewish origin born in Karlovy Vary. I confided to her that I was in Zimbabwe without family, my wife was working in Prague at the American embassy, so she jokingly offered to call me "local wife"... (A common occurrence among European straw widowers sent to Africa for a few years.)
It wasn't until my colleague and friend, the Kuwaiti ambassador, discovered my Czech snuffbox in action: Anežka Pezoldová.
Back home in the Czech Republic, we had such a driving force behind the post-Soviet events: the Civic Democratic Alliance. It advocated to speed up the granting/returning of Czech citizenship to former members of noble families. The ODA soon lost the elections and disappeared from the scene, although the efforts of the alliance to invite the former nobility, whose titles were taken away by the democratic president Tomáš Masaryk, persisted and cost us a lot of money. Mrs. Pezold showed me her Czech passport on Compatriot Friday and assured me that she was learning Czech. This was followed by an invitation to visit the family farm where Virginia tobacco was grown, as well known in the world as Zhatec hops.
Miloš Zeman visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and did not bring Vladimir Remek, the official representative of the Czech Republic in the RF. Our media consistently chastise him for this. I did not make the same mistake: I was accompanied to the African residence of the noblewoman Elisabeth Pezold of the Schwarzenberg family and her husband Rüdiger by our accountant, the ambassadorial attaché, and his wife. Our hosts, in whose lodgings we stayed overnight, showed us around the beautiful African countryside, which includes ancient inscriptions on the rocks made by members of the tribe that once called the region lord. We walked through a tobacco leaf factory and talked about the African workers and their living and working conditions. Sometimes they go on strike to improve them, Rüdiger says. This then prompts them to choose spokespeople among themselves, and with them at the table we agree on what and how to change to the benefit of both sides.
White businessmen are slowly ringing the bell because of President Mugabe and it will take some time before conditions become international again, as is already happening in the northern part of the former Rhodesia, now Zambia.
In the Czech Republic, Karel Schwarzenberg, adopted in 1960 by his uncle living in Austria into the Schwarzenberg branch of the Hlubok-Krumlov family, became the head of the family and a wealthy man from a poor nobleman after the coup. Twenty years after the adoption, he inherited property in Austria and also received billions in restitution at home. He is Austria's second largest private forest owner and is also one of the largest private forest owners in the Czech Republic.
According to Czech law, inheritance rights from biological parents are extinguished by adoption, and the prince was adopted as an adult, which is not known in Czech justice. Nevertheless, the nation lived in a turbulent post-amet era, when even Václav Havel did not come up short when it came to compensation.
In 1995, I had dinner with the Pezolds in Prague's Old Town. On that occasion, the police towed their car for bad parking. I took them by taxi to their sparsely furnished temporary apartment in Spořilov, where even a light bulb hung from the living room ceiling. They were waiting for the results of the lawsuits.
One day I received an invitation to a funeral service at the Schwarzenbergs' tomb in Postoloprty ("postoly prtati" was Old Czech for "to cheat, to snipe"), the only (or first?) restitution that Anežka Pezoldová, Karel Schwarzenberg's own sister, had won. I didn't attend, I couldn't just take time off work and go to the Ústí region.
One day I was asked to be present when Dr. Rüdiger Pezold was received by the Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Palouš. The visitor explained to Dr. Palouš the state of the restitution process in the Czech courts in favour of his wife and asked how the Czech Foreign Service could contribute to its progress. They parted with the conclusion that the Deputy would receive a resume of the case from the Pezolds in order to possibly become involved in the matter. Rüdiger stressed that the question was not whether Elisabeth would be handed over the property that belonged to her, which would undoubtedly happen through legal channels, but how soon it would happen.
The Hluboka branch of the Schwarzenbergs, to which A. Pezoldová claims to have owned:
The castle in Červený Dvůr
Schwarzenberg Palace in Hradčany
Castle in Český Krumlov
The Golden Crown Monastery
Hluboká nad Vltavou Castle
Hunting lodge at Hluboká
Salm Palace at Hradčany
Castle in Trebon
Schwarzenberg Tomb at the Svět pond near Třeboň
Plot of land near Zlatá u1ičky now belonging to the Office of the President of the Republic, about 50 square metres
Hundreds of properties around the towns of Jindřichův Hradec, Třeboň, Louny, Český Krumlov, Pelhřimov, Prachatice, České Budějovice, Písek, Klatovy, Most, Teplice, Strakonice and Jihlava (Source: Mladá fronta DNES 12.8.2003 and 13.8.2002).
The Salm Palace on Hradčany Square, in front of which the statue of TGM stands, is used by the National Gallery as an exhibition space. Weddings are held at the H1uboká castle, I have been to one myself, and Karel Schwarzenberg, when he was Foreign Minister, held diplomatic conferences there. To make matters worse, the heiress of the Hluboká branch of the Schwarzenberg family will not even receive the painting of her great-grandmother Ida, which hangs in the Hluboká castle, from the National Heritage Institute, following the decision of the Constitutional Court in April 2012.
Half-brother Karel has the upper hand. Elisabeth wiped her nose. Will Rüdiger von Pezold's prediction to Palouš finally come true? A total of 40 billion crowns.
The Pezolds married in 1970, have two daughters and five sons. The estate of Adolf Schwarzenberg, which was transferred to the Czech Republic by Act No. 143/1947 Coll., should be managed by someone if the heiress gets what she has been asking for in vain for years.
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