Josef Bruzl

"I was carrying a stove, thinking I’d take it with me. There was a firebox at the bottom, and on top of it was this tall… thing. I grabbed it and brought it to the trailer by the bikes. Then this comrade came rushing after me and said, ‘Bring it back right now! Tomeš Bruzl won’t be bathing his ass here anymore!’ So I took it back to the bathroom—I had already loaded it onto the trailer."

"I was moving it with horses, we had a tow behind the horses on tires. First I took a pile of wood to Brtnice so we could have something to heat our home. We had to make an entrance to the apartment there. We broke through the chimney so we could go in there. But it was all our favour, my mother's sister and her husband Musil - an excellent locksmith. They saved us, they helped us the most. They gave us food, it was in November and we had no bread, we had no money. All the money for milk and grain that we gave in the autumn, it stayed with the state."

"The communists had the task of eliminating the smartest people. Literally, I'll say liquidate. Why did dad go to Jáchymov to dig uranium? Every day the guards and warders told them: 'You're all going to die here! You won't survive, we have the task of liquidating you here.' Imagine when you came back from a twelve-hour shift. Downstairs my father, I don't know how many floors he was digging uranium, so how can you survive that for long? If Gottwald and Stalin hadn't died that year, we wouldn't have seen him again."

"If I could change anything, I wouldn't change anything now, girl, but if I could, I'd rather be at home, at home, yeah. In this house where we're sitting now. Back in the days of the comrades, of course. We've got it in us already, imagine I'm the eleventh housekeeper on this house since that 1656. There's nobody here, 11th in line. Now there's going to be another one again, isn't there, but the eleventh one. So I always say, when I remember these things, so we must have that love for the land, love for the countryside, love for the village perhaps already in our genes."

"They allowed them to make fire after ten o'clock, but as was the custom then, there was a snitch in every hostel. It was one man guarding another. So he denounced it and got everybody in that dormitory corrected, so to speak. That's a tight detention, you don't sleep in your bed anymore. Those were concrete huts, bunkers, where there were no windows, nothing, just doors. So they had to survive the night there. My father said that he lasted three days, that there was nothing to sit on, just walk around. There was nothing to sit on at all, so he lasted three days like that and then he said, 'I don't care anymore.' He sat down against the wall, leaned his back against the wall, and when he was tired and fell asleep, he got pneumonia from the concrete wall."

"It used to be that at seven o'clock in the morning.... It's interesting that they waited for everything to be harvested. When the corn, the potatoes, everything was harvested, then on November 20, two state police officers came to our place. Our parents were just having breakfast, so they came and told my father, `We have orders here to take you to the Jihlava prison. So get dressed and come with us.' My father asked where they would take him or what would happen. ‘To the Jihlava prison, you’ll find out everything there.’ Well, they took him there, and he was in Jihlava for about fourteen days. Then they transferred him to Jáchymov."