Petr Brod

“So what was happening, I could see the big purges in my own family. I knew that there was what we feared before we traveled, that the borders of the state were almost sealed, and that it was very difficult to travel to the West. And when we arrived in Prague, I saw basically such a return to the age of about sixty-three: gray streets, decorated with silly banners saying we stay with the Soviet Union forever and never do otherwise. Previously, it was only with the Soviet Union forever, now there was a note ´never otherwise´. Everywhere, even in the interpretations, the wreckage of the ideology and the caution of friends in contact with me, but not exaggerated, I would not say. I don't think people were afraid to meet me directly. I also did not meet with a wide circle of acquaintances, but mostly with relatives and family friends and with a few classmates who liked to meet up. It all turned out basically in the sense that I didn't have any cover with the secret police. So whenever I arrived and I stayed with my aunt, I had to come to Bartolomějská Street as soon as possible and register with the police department, which monitored the movement of foreigners and wanted to know where I lived in Czechoslovakia as a foreigner."

“So my father found himself in a very disadvantageous position from the cadre's point of view of the Communist regime as a Jewish person who had German education, was seen on the wrong side from the Communist side during the war because he was in the West; and so on and on. Just everything negative from the point of view of the Communists, with one exception, paradoxically, that he was not a member of the Party, so he could not be suspected of creeping into the Party as an agent of imperialism or a hostile element. He was simply openly hostile from their point of view, but on the other hand, he wasn't so important that they would deal with him much. They simply demoted him professionally and socially and kept showing him that he was a second-class person and that was quite enough for them. So in my birth certificate there is a note in the father´s section: JUDr Lev Brod, an assistant worker by profession. That was when I was born, he mostly worked in various branches of the CKD concern, mainly in CKD Dukla in the 1950s, where he was also a lathe and crane operator, he could occasionally return to the heat of an office - in Dukla he was a boiler buyer, but he was mostly in the unqualified or additionally qualified jobs; of course he had to learn to operate the machines and had to learn to ride a hall crane suspended from the ceiling, but that hadn't made him a skilled worker yet. He tried to escape from it, and he eventually succeeded after ten years, around the year 1958, when he was taken over by the Prague Information Service as a guide for foreigners enrolled in the State Jewish Museum, taking into account his knowledge and skills. After about two years he was taken over directly by the Jewish Museum. But there was a cadre ceiling again. He couldn't do anything else. He would have liked to work in a library or something, but was prevented by his lack of membership in the Communist Party.”