"My friend Jirka Hadáček was there, they had a small farm, it's such a rocky region, if you know the area..." - "It's beautiful there. It's beautiful." - "They weren't big landowners, but they had maybe thirty hectares. When we were in the first grade, our teacher was a communist, a big communist, and she said, 'Hadáčku, stand up!' He stood up and she said, 'Children, don’t befriend him; he’s a kulak.'" - "Did you experience that in the classroom?" - "I experienced that in first grade. At break, because my parents were telling me, `Don't believe that someone is a kulak, these are decent people,' I went up to him and said, `Jirko, don't worry, I'll be friends with you.' And even at a primary school reunion after I don't know how many years, probably 50 years, he remembered this, he says, 'I remember this, you were the only one who didn't stop being friends with me because I'm a kulak.'"
"People were, not only broken physically, by physical violence - my grandfather, for example, lost all his teeth in detention." - "So he was beaten there?" - "They were beaten there in a terrible way. This person [one of the fellow prisoners] I even know that at that time grandfather expressed his suspicion that he must have been under some pills, that he was a terribly brave person, he never killed anyone, but that in that interrogation or in that court, he made all kinds of confessions. They made a man confess to murdering his own mother, they made him confess to anything. My grandfather, I remember that too, he said that they showed him a lady with a big belly behind a glass door and said, 'Your lady is having a baby, don't you care? You should go to her, try. And if you confess, we'll let you go so you can be there when your child grows up.' And he said, 'No way. I was leaving and my wife was certainly not pregnant, she's fifty-one years old. That's out of the question.' And they said, 'No, so look at the lady.' In short, it was fabricated, my grandmother was obviously not pregnant, they had one child, and that was my dad, who was an adult by then."
"He went through several prisons, but Leopoldov was probably the worst. It was in southern Slovakia - a kind of fortress actually from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We went there for several hours by train - it was difficult - when my grandfather was allowed visits. I went there with my father, with my grandmother. I remember the huge walls, it was very scary. They made us wait for a long time in front of the gatehouse, so I remember seeing my grandfather through a sort of opening, like a loophole, somewhere far behind the deep wall. Just like I can see you now. And he was talking to me. Then, the second time we were in Leopoldov, I remember it a little better, that's when my grandfather was talking to me about what I was reading. I was reading very early, I wasn't in school yet and I was already reading Old Greek Fables and Tales. So he'd talk to me about the Greek gods and stuff. But the visits in that prison, there were several visits, then he was in Valdice near Jičín, we used to go there too. So I used to go to all those prisons as a little girl."
"When that... Toman Brod has... and now I don't know, that's his cousin... he was... a reporter... and he was a reporter at Voice of America at the time, no, at Free Europe in Munich. Free Europe in Munich. He wasn't allowed to come here, he was like an emigrant, this Peter Brod. And when there was this relaxation after the events in Letna, the communist government fell, he said, if we don't want to go to Munich, he has an apartment there, we could stay there for a few days. And before Christmas 1989, my father, my husband and I and our two boys went to Munich. And suddenly we went across the border, nobody stopped us, nobody filtered us, nobody did any customs check. And we crossed the border. My dad was driving and he said, 'I've got to stop.' He got out of the car and he knelt down there by the side of the road and he said, 'Oh my God, thank you for letting me live to see this.' So that was one of my most powerful experiences, where my dad didn't even believe he was going to live to see freedom. What is commonplace to you today was not commonplace to us. Freedom was something. It was a dream."
"Because Palach, when he was lying on his burns, a quite famous sculptor, Olbram Zoubek, came there and he took off his death mask. And the death mask... several copies were made, I don't know if two or three. I don't know, I'm not sure. And one of them was kept by Dr. Toman Brod, a longtime friend of our family, who kept it at our cottage, because it was just something they weren't allowed to find during the search. It was with them every now and then, and after that seventy-seven year, he signed the Charter. So to... some of the materials, the papers, he stored at the cottage. And among other things, Jan Palach's death mask was stored there."
"That's not a simple question, I had a beautiful childhood on the one hand, but on the other hand a childhood with a shadow hanging over it. Because when I was two years old, I experienced my first search by the SS because they arrested my grandfather and came to do a search. I was a little girl, two years old... it was on Good Friday, it was quite interesting... and I was a little girl sitting on my mother's lap and I was looking at these State Security officers who were just throwing things out of drawers, looking through every book to see if there were any leaflets or anything like that. And I was frowning at them, and this one State Security officer said, 'Little girl, why are you frowning at us?' And he said, 'What have we done to you?' And I just said, ‚Pánové nejsou ho(d)ný!‘ ('Gentleman are not nice! They'll leave.' And I didn't talk to them anymore."
Pavla Erbanová, maiden name Studená, was born on 28 March 1950 into the family of Svatopluk Studený, then a director of short films. Two years later, her grandfather Svatopluk Studený Sr. was arrested and sentenced by the communist regime for treason to twelve years in prison. Pavla Erbanová felt the consequences of this all her life and developed a natural dislike for the regime and a desire for freedom. Her grandfather was released in 1960. In 1968, she experienced the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops, witnessing both elemental resistance and innocent civilian casualties. She took part in the occupation strike at the Faculty of Science of Charles University, where she studied between 1968 and 1974, and in the funeral of Jan Palach. His death mask by Olbram Zoubek (one of the copies) was hidden by Toman Brod in their cottage. She worked as a microbiologist, first in the health sector, later (from 1982) at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. During the normalisation period she was in contact with dissidents, especially the families of Toman Brod and Zbyněk Hejda. On the advice of the latter, despite her initial determination, she did not sign Charter 77. Her husband Vladimír Erban and her father were interrogated by the secret police for their contacts with the Chartists. In 1989 she participated in the Velvet Revolution. In 2023 she was living in Prague.
