"Beneš died and there was a joke which she said at work during a snack or at lunch, I don't know how it is written there [in the judgment]. She said that Gottwald could not come to Beneš's funeral because he was leaving the pub, tripped over a hammer and stabbed himself sickle in his ass, as it literally says. Two of her co-workers reported her and she was convicted. It was also never discussed when she married a professional soldier in 1951, she only mentioned it to him during the amnesty in 1960. She told her husband and he didn't talk to her for three months, he told her that he could have been fired from the army and stuff like that, but it wasn't talked about and their kids didn't know about it."
"Because I had a relation to an American woman, she used to come to us with her brother, so [Tomáš] Hradílek and I tried to found a branch of the Society of Friends of the USA in Tršice. It turned out that nothing came of it. Then he brought me posters and I hung them up, it was an invitation to a demonstration in Prague on October 28, 1988. Someone reported me for hanging it somewhere." – "Did you put them up in Tršice?" – "We were on holidays in Brno and Budapest, I had it for about a month. I took it everywhere with me and gave it away, I don't know who reported me. They searched my house and I have to say that the police from Bystřice helped me a lot. Russian soldiers used to go to our place in Tršice to the dam, the boys, my wife's sons, went to that dam to swim and the Russians asked them to bring them beer or apple cider and some fruit wine. They exchanged a bottle of fruit wine for live cartridges. I had a pile of ammunition in the children's room under the bed. Once I figured it out, I threw it in the trash, and coincidentally the search came. I also told them that if they found it, it would be trouble. They found it there, they started saying that it was arming. I said I didn't know about that." – "Was that in 1988?" – "Yes. They said that they may or may not believe it. We had the entire department from Bystřice plus two State Security officers. They were sitting in the dining room, typing on a typewriter, and then my son, who was about ten years old at the time, came, and it struck him that he saw the cops that there was going to be trouble. He went to the children´s room, put it in a plastic bag, lowered it from the window on a string and went to get it, but there was a policeman outside standing there. He came back with it and dumped it on the table. They went into the children´s room and a policeman came and he threw a Carl Gustaf 8.4 cm recoilless rifle on the table, but it was empty, unusable. And also the cartridges. And one of the policemen from Bystřice, named Chlup, [he then changed his name], said that the ammunition was useless, there had to be a special rifle for it. He said that this ammunition is also banned in the Republic of South Africa, it had a 4.5 mm caliber and the bullet was long, unbalanced, it was not an expanding buller, but it was worse, it rotated off-center and there was a shot, a hole in the back. So, he blurted it out, but of course they confiscated it. There was an amnesty in the end, I don't know what they would do with it."
"It was a cell for two, in which there were five of us. At midnight they brought in the sixth one, a soldier. We kept telling him what he was doing there, that he had nothing to do there and what he was there for. So, he told us that they had caught a soldier and they bullied him. When the janitor brought me my first lunch, I made a mess and gave it back to him saying they wanted to kill me, that I was a diabetic and needed a diabetic diet. He started banging on the window with that baton, and guess what, that was - we didn't know each other that much, but we recognized each other, we played handball against each other, he played for Rokytnice - so we knew each other, normally. He was beating with that baton around himself, I said I wanted to report. So, I went to Mengel, as they called him, the prison doctor where I got the diabetic diet."
Vladislav Drajsajtl was born on March 12, 1950 in Grygov to Vladislav and Jarmila née Lapčíková as the younger of two children. In 1948, his father’s business was nationalized, after which both parents worked in blue-collar professions. In 1954, the family moved to their grandparents in Nelešovice. After completing basic education, Vladislav graduated from an electrical engineering school in Olomouc. In 1968, he married Jiřina Machová, with whom he has two children. In 1969, he joined Olma as an electrical maintenance worker. In the years 1969–1971, he completed the military service in Opava and Olšany near Benešov. After his return, he built a house in Tršice, to which the family moved in 1975. In 1981, he married for the second time, he and his wife Alena raised a daughter together, and he also raised two sons of his wife. In 1977, Vladislav Drajsajtl and Tomáš Hradílek tried to found a branch of the Society of Friends of the USA (SPUSA) in Tršice. He was detained for several days for posting leaflets inviting people to a demonstration in Prague on October 28, 1988. He co-founded the Civic Forum (OF) in Tršice. Until the Velvet Revolution, he worked on construction sites as an electro mechanic. After 1992, he worked as a self-employed person in the electrical field. In 2023, at the time of filming, he lived in Tršice.
