Mojmír Babušík

"They sent a politruk who told me: 'Something happened to your parents, you're supposed to come home'. We had an agreement with Klobas (Oldřich Klobas), that should something happen, the code sentence would be that something happened at home and I should come home. Well, even though just half of the sentence was right, you can't expect that uninvolved people will give you the exact word order. He told me that they had a car there and could take me home if I wanted. I wanted to take the train but he insisted that they would take me home by car, that it was no problem at all for them. So I got into the car and they introduced themselves to me: 'we're from the state security'. And that was it."

"At first they tried it in a polite way but then: 'will you talk you bitch?!' They smacked me on the face a couple of times and then they brought two truncheons. One of them was a state-security truncheon and the other one was an authentic Gestapo truncheon. The German one was about this long. It was basically a steel rod covered with rubber. The Czech one was a piece of a hosepipe filled with lead or something of the sort. They could break your bones easily with the Czech truncheon. There was nothing you could do. They always outnumbered you. I was helpless against them. I was slim, 20-year-old boy who weighted only about 50 kilos. We weren't beaten so badly, but they banged our heads against the wall. I still have problems today. Sometimes, when I stand at an intersection and the traffic light is on red, I see green instead or vice versa."