"We had a cottage and we had it near Nové Mitrovice, between Nové Mitrovice and Spálený Poříčí, and the Russians robbed our cottage. There was some whole... brigade, division, just a lot of soldiers in the woods. They robbed the hut, but in a strange way. We didn't have anything there, so they took the cuckoo clock and the stove. And they took the stove because they were cold. And a policeman there, a Mr. Brož, went to investigate, let the dog out on the trail, came back, he was yellow-green, he was sick. And he said, 'The dog led me to the people who stole the stove, and their commander took a gun and shot everybody and walked away and it was all over.' My mother was very traumatized by that, because actually three more or less innocent people - because I don't consider it a crime for somebody who is terribly cold to take a stove somewhere - to end up like that."
"They arrested him [my father] afterwards because there was a Dr Reimann who was Deputy Foreign Minister during the war and just after the war, they were friends. And this Dr. Reimann wrote some anti-communist booklet and my father printed it for him. And they found out. In the meantime, there were such humorous incidents, like they used to do that in the printing press when you put the typesetting together, it's made up of letters and it's pulled together with these clamps. It's such a complex thing, so it's not easy to take a letter out of it. And what they did was they took a hot nail and they used that nail to melt the letter, The letter. Well, when Chruščov came there, somebody, Lord knows who, but it happened on my father's typewriter, so it said 'Nikita Chruščov je posel míru a přátelství' ('Nikita Chruščov is the messenger of peace and friendship'), and he erased the 'P', so it said 'Nikita Chruščov je osel' ('Nikita Chruščov is an ass'). He was never convicted, he was just in pre-trial detention for a long time and came back as a broken man, never the same. He couldn't stand the psychological pressure, they even fired him from his job, so he committed suicide."
"I did my schooling at the CSAO [Czechoslovak Automotive Repair Works], then I started my university studies and they said they're going to make me, the comrades, head of the Koterov repair shop. The deputy for personnel and personnel work called me in and said, 'Comrade, we have huge plans for you, you're going to do this and this, what do you say?' I said, 'Yeah, I'd like that, to be the manager.' But he said, 'Comrade Brejcha, there's a catch, you have to join the Party. And because the deputy had a girl here from Plzenec, I said to him: 'Mr Motlik, I can't do that, my father would come to scare me every night if I joined the Communist Party.' And he said, 'So you're not joining?' And I said, 'So I'm not joining.' 'So you know what? You're just going to be an admissions officer forever.'"
Petr Brejcha was born on 15 May 1951 in Nezvěstice. He grew up in Starý Plzenec, where his family owned a printing house and a bookstore since the First Republic. The development of the promising company was interrupted by 1948 and the nationalization of private property. His father Ervín Brejcha was tried and after his return from detention he voluntarily ended his life. Petr Brejcha was only allowed to take an apprenticeship for personnel report reasons, but later he completed his secondary school education by distance. He had problems in his employment at the Czechoslovak Automotive Repair Works (CSAO) because he did not want to join the party. He participated in an anti-regime demonstration at the unbuilt monument to the US Army in Pilsen in 1969. In the 1980s, he became friends with Jan Ruml and his brother Jiří, with whom he had an understanding. It was Jiří who gave him the petition Several Sentences to sign, and the witness then had to go into the working-class profession. After the Velvet Revolution he was nominated as a co-opted deputy of the Federal Assembly for the Civic Forum in Přeštice, but he refused the post. He founded his own driving school and later worked in a company for searching stolen vehicles. He died not long after the interview was filmed, on 19 January 2024.
