Vladimír Hahn

"My father said there was also a file on Milada Horáková at the Pilsen Regional Court. My father was its chairman. In the 1950s, the court received files from the police, and there was also a court decision to execute or imprison her for ten or fifteen years. There was a verdict prepared. My father, when they brought it to his desk, looked at it and said: 'This is impossible, we are supposed to get a police investigation and here is the written sentence with the amount of punishment. I can't sign that.'"

"Mostly there were problems with property. My uncle Josef had a corner shop and a coffee roasting plant in Přemyslova Street, one of the first in Pilsen. In 1918 he got a paper that he was exempted from military service forever. After 1948, the communists wanted to confiscate everything, his house, his shop. They ended up taking away his paper saying he was exempt from military service. My father started to make arrangements, but they came for my uncle at night, at four in the morning. They took him to the PTP (Auxilliary Technical Battalions), at the age of fifty-two, to the uranium mines."

"I remember a lot of things from Žlutice, even though we lost the farm when I was only two and a half years old. When the communists came with a notice that they were confiscating the property, my grandfather had a heart attack and died. He was over sixty years old and had worked there all his life. His eldest son, an agricultural engineer, was to continue there. After 1948 he fled to America."

"My father was good at it. When a comrade came to him sometime in 1949 or 1950 carrying a paper saying they wanted a tenement, my father looked at it and said, 'Well, you're writing here according to the decree. But according to what law?' They didn't have any support in the law, they hadn't made them yet. In the end we kept the house, nobody came, nobody took it from us after that."