Božena Hlaďová

“My husband was watched even in Africa. Every group sent abroad was accompanied by someone who watched and who was sent by the Party and the government. There was this lieutenant also, who was a member of the political staff. So we were under surveillance even in Africa. But in Africa we got into an environment, after a long time, which was quite different from the one here. We came among the Englishmen, who have never known anything like this. They could enjoy life, they could show it and they really enjoyed it. Despite the fact that they were there on business. These people were clerks, a bank director, Englishmen on duty overseas, as they liked to say. We just fit in. We became members of the golf club and thus separated from the Czech group. It needs to be said that the Czech people, including the officers, could not speak English much, so they lived their lives, saved money for Tuzex stores and once a year they could travel home for free.”

“These were difficult times as every day we learned something which was not good, which did not mean good future. My husband had a career before him. He had the highest English decoration, he was the Knight of the French Legion d’honeur, he had six Czechoslovakian war crosses, he was a great pilot and a successful commander. He had a career before him. Now everything was past. We knew that. What we didn’t know was how our lives would develop.”

“In 1948 major cleansing started in Prague and the members of the General Staff and senior soldiers who had been to England, such as Fajtl, Pernikář and others, were sent on holidays. This was the beginning of dismissals from the army. In Budweis it did not arrive until winter 1948/49. At that time my husband had health problems and suffered from pains, but the times were uncertain, we kept waiting what would happen and he ignored it. It went so far that his appendix perforated. He was in hospital, where he received messages about his friends being fired from the army. His best friend Klán was fired, Čermák was fired… this I learned from him in the hospital, where he received the news.”

“Germans arrived in Trhové Sviny at the end of the war. It was just a small unit which was to built barricades on roads against the advancing Red Army. Their commander, a lieutenant Dauber, stays with us. We were fine with him. He was an elderly gentleman, a fortification specialists, he wrote several books on the topic, he lectured at a school in Potsdam. He was unhappy, he said the war didn’t make sense. He didn’t know about his family and he kept saying that what they were doing did not make sense at all. When there was a revolution of the fifth of May and flags were hung from windows, people started to gather in the square. And the German troops who built the barricades were ordered by lieutenant Dauber to hand over the weapons at the town hall and come to his office in the Court. This was a huge gesture by the Germans. We had a very sensible mayor and he accepted. But the next day a group of drunk SS men arrived from Budweis, took twelve boys from the square, marched them out of the town and shot them. Lieutenant Dauber was taken in a car two kilometres from the town and shot too in return for giving up Sviny without fighting. We all were afraid, we stayed at home and the square was occupied by the SS who left on the seventh and on the eight the Russians came.”

“When there was the healthcare reform, my father welcomed it. There were ambulances coming, experts, such as otologists, gynaecologists etc. started coming from Budweis. My father had to do all of this before. He found it a very demanding job. Healthcare was nationalised in 1952. Our house was nationalised. I got it back after forty-five years. They made a health centre there and left two rooms upstairs for my parents. They had to turn the bathroom into a kitchen. When my father died soon after, my mum was moved to Budweis to a flat in an uncompleted housing estate. She was an old lady then. A doctor whom everybody knew in Trhové Sviny and suddenly she found herself in a quite unknown environment. But my mum was brave. She read a lot and could embroider beautifully so we tried to keep her busy as we could. She was brave.”

“This Doležal started coming to us, he said that he wanted to be a guide too, he asked about materials for guides and asked about the business. I learned from the files that he was an agent commissioned to spy on my husband and that he reported the very next day what was said at our place the day before. These were just irrelevant things, that my mum was ill, that our daughter was God knows what. But we were definitely under surveillance. My daughter exchanged letters with her best friend who emigrated, and she had another friend in Switzerland, so he read all the letters.”

“I worked in the information service and there was a whole group of communists. They ran this campaign, interrogated us on what our opinion was on the brotherly help of Soviet armies in 1968. We were called before this commission. You can lie but you cannot lie completely. You can lie about irrelevant things, because in time you will forget, but when I arrived there and saw those women, how they stared at me and now there was this terrible silence. When they asked me, I told them… whether I agreed with the intervention of those armies, I replied, ‘I don’t. The war was horrible, it was so horrible that mankind could have learned and all military and political conflicts could be solved diplomatically, at the green table. My boss was a wife of a diplomat and it worked.”

“When my husband was more or less fired from the airport, I had to move. I had a four-month-old baby, another daughter a year-and-a-half old, my husband seriously ill and I had to move out the villa by myself. Well… I was young, I was twenty, so I cannot really imagine today how I could have coped. My parents still had their flat in Sviny, near Budweis, so they made a room for me, moved out their bedroom and freed two rooms for me.”