Zdeněk Baueršíma

"My mother went [to Switzerland] ten or twelve times and each time I had to fill in everything for her. Of course, I was the closest at hand. The strangest thing was that I was actually saving people, because when they asked me about someone, I didn't keep quiet, I defended them. And quickly, they changed topics. So I have no pangs of conscience about that and all my friends know about it. I have a perfectly clear conscience, I have never signed anything. It was only registered that I used to go there and they could interrogate me, but I have never signed anything in my life."

"When I arrived at State Security, there were double bars. I can even name the one who interrogated me. You could see how he was turning it [recording device] all on, and he asked me about people, he told me: 'You are from Stavoprojekt, there is an engineer Sedlák who goes to church, is that true?' I said that yes, he was a great friend, a classmate, that he went to church, but there was nothing wrong with that. Then he asked me again about someone. He told me that he had heard that the person had done such and such things. And I said that it was nonsense. Every time I came back from the interrogation, I immediately ran to the people and told them what they had asked me about, 'Hey, they asked me about you making some anti-state poster.' That's how I always told the people."

“When I was in the Technical Auxiliary Battalions, life was very tough there. The wake-up call was at 4 a.m., the working time was around ten, twelve hours a day. Once a week we were working in these nuclear…, that meant in gas masks on scaffolding and so on. And who didn't meet the standard… The civilian standard was 150 %. We didn´t work to meet 100%, but 150 %. Whoever didn't meet the standard had to go finish it after the lights out and report when he was done. And it was really tough. And of course there was excavation work, too - hardest jobs, earthwork, masonry work, concrete work.”

"I know that we were organizing Majáles and I was kind of the main one in the parade. And I remember it was even being broadcasted. There were strongly anti-state slogans chanted there. I never knew who did or didn't report me, but supposedly they were filming it with a camera from a ledge and from windows. So I can't say who denounced me or anything... Actually, after that, they took advantage of the fact that I was handing in projects and they used it as a pretext. They couldn't say the reason was political. So they said I handed in a project an hour later or something like that."

“In Sezemice it was a big textile factory that was, however, suddenly being converted as the war had started. The Germans came, they seized the textile machines and started turning it into toy manufacturing. It was a secret production of weapons, of course. And I remember that the Germans were making quite a mess there. They occupied houses and so on. My father had been the director of the factory. He had even had a Hetzen car with a driver at his disposal. We had had a swimming pool in our garden, a beautiful life really, but it finished because my father didn't want anything to do with the Germans.”