Pavel Hlaváč

“That was a dramatic moment, I described it nicely in one interview - simply, a horde of blokes tore into the flat at half past four. We lived on the first floor of a detached house; my uncle, Mum’s brother, and her father, Grandpa Kukliš, a shoemaker, lived downstairs. We children were sleeping in the bedroom, we woke up, and there were terrible things going on. Mum was a stickler for keeping things neat, and everything was strewn about the floor, drawers emptied, they behaved like pigs. That was their kind of terror tactic. We stood on the bed, hugging each other around the neck and crying, Mum was crying as well, Dad stood by the window, a bloke next to him, cuffed... I didn’t understand it at all, I have a detailed description in one of my memories here. I was brought up in Sunday school, where there was this kind Brother Jirsa, and he had a flannelgraph [a board of fabric used to tell a story by placing pictures on top - trans.], and he always put such a nice Lord Jesus there, then Jesus’s heart, our hearts... So it was a trusting kind of faith, and now my father... I always knew I could rely on him, Mum was in tears, he was in cuffs, and the Lord God was nowhere to be seen. I was utterly confused, I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t even remember when those brutes left.”

“And then it started getting to me, the atmosphere of the prison; I was small, I had packets of cigarettes in my pocket to give my father if we could meet somehow, which they didn’t allow. There was this barbed kind of... terrible thing... a bit like in a barracks, a kind of stench from the floors, and the space was confining.”