"We went to Mohelnice, there was a transfer. From Mohelnice we went to the Mírov prison. So, of course, it was like taking a train at night, for a little boy it was a kind of adventure of course. So how did one perceive it? There were such cubicles in Mírov, so I only saw Dad behind such a wire lattice. Behind him stood a prison guard, we were... we couldn't shake hands, nothing could happen. So I remember how always - I don't know, either my dad's parents were there or my mom - how someone picked me up for my dad to see me, because the cubicle was wooden and high up. There were no serious things to talk about, so they said, 'What can you write, little Vladimir?' And I've always been terribly embarrassed about what to say. There was always a huge tension in it. Well, the whole thing ended, say, in three-quarters of an hour, so we were released from the prison again. Then we waited for the bus and then we drove again almost all day, then it didn't go too fast, back to Prague."
"So I have such a picture, the son takes his father to a communist prison, so I accompanied him there. The door opened and the prison guards all went... almost like, “Come on, you old man!” They were satisfied that it was exactly timed... that like what he should have done then I don't know - a seventeen-year-old boy? Should I have taken the iron bar and started thrashing them there, or what was I supposed to do? In short, from this tension that nothing could be done at all, and it had mixed feelings inside a person, so I was not able, when the door - there was a door that opened really slowly, almost like in a crematorium, when it closed and then it opened at the last minute, so there was another one waving at me like that, as cynically as if it's a lot of fun when I was leaving. I remember just having a terrible seizure. I cried, yes, but there was nothing I could do, so I wandered for two hours before my eyes dried."
"Well, when my grandfather and I returned from Vyšehrad, there were several Tatraplans standing in front of the barracks, it was such a government car then. People in leather coats went there and simply carried out stacks of papers of all kinds, loading it into the Tatraplans. My grandfather and I wanted to go, we lived on the fourth floor, we wanted to go up the elevator, but it didn't work because they fully occupied the elevator. So grandpa, who was already age-old at the time, he just took a long time. When we climbed out, it turned out that those people... our doors were open and those people were taking things out of our apartment. Dad had a number of files, books, and all this, just an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or he also worked at the statistical office. So they took all this and carried it all down. So all I remember is that I still couldn't understand this. I kept asking, where my dad was, because that was the time he normally came home from work. Dad wasn't there anymore."
Vladimír Albrecht was born on January 11, 1947 in Prague. When he was four years old, his father Oldřich Albrecht was arrested by the state security and subsequently sentenced to twenty years in prison in a fabricated trial with the so-called Green International. He served his sentence first in Mírov Prison and then in Ruzyně and Pankrác. In 1964, under special circumstances, he was released to go home for one day, and only a few months later did he receive his actual release. Vladimír was not allowed to study at first for political reasons, but he managed to finish his high school diploma in the evening and in 1967 he was accepted to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. After graduating, he worked at the Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences and after the Velvet Revolution at the Technology Center of the Academy of Sciences, where he tries to support Czech research within European competition. He is married and has three children.
