Ivana Bočková

“Something that surprises me greatly: my mom had been expelled from the Communist Party. They [she and father] were both prewar members of the Party. One of them was a member since 1931, the other since 1933. And in spite of all these insane experiences, when both of them were expelled, and their member’s cards had been returned to them after I don’t know how many years… After her death, they expelled my mother from the Party, and all the time he has been trying to annul the decision, and to make them revoke their annulment of her membership. I am absolutely not able to grasp this. If they do something to me, the Party does something to me, and in spite of that, he was even still trying to get back into the Party. I am absolutely not able to understand this. They had to have this insanely great conviction that the Party was a wonderful thing.”

“My dad has saved himself, being a Jew and a communist, and he was dispatched, so at first he went to Italy, and from Italy to France, and via Portugal he reached England. He thus spent the war in England and thus he saved his life. My mother was a Catholic and so she did not have this problem. I think that she served in Tábor and later in Benešov, as a doctor, as far as I know. And that’s probably where her psychic problems developed. She suffered from serious insomnia and she underwent treatment and she was sinking into depression as a result of it, and what probably triggered it was that in Benešov she was treating women who had been raped by Russian soldiers. She was a Communist, and it was probably very hard for her to bear it, and this was probably one of the causes of her illness.”