Věra Houšková

“Well, I found out at night that my water broke and that I had to go to the maternity hospital. So, my husband went to have a look because the tanks had been driving under our windows and along the castle the whole night. So, he went there to look whether it was possible to set off and he did not come back. They arrested him and called Štiřín (the castle – trans.) a basic unit of the counterrevolution. A centre was located there. So, they nicked the manager of the centre, I do not know what kind of centre it was. They nicked four people like this. Two managers and some passers-by. A blue-collar worker in a newsboy hat was riding a bike, so they nicked him as well. They were four of them and they put them in an armoured car. He said: ‘Well, it was such a feeling! I was wearing a violet T-shirt, a new one, and was saying to myself – a hole will appear in it.‘ He just did not believe he would survive it.“

“Well, they nationalised the brickworks in 1948 but given the fact they did not have any other specialist, they let him keep working there as the manager of the brickworks. So basically, nothing changed for him. He accepted it because he knew that such was the time, so he kept on working as the manager of his brickworks. Well, until 1953 or 1954, and then it happened that some sediments appeared in clay in the clay pit. We did not know at all what those were. And those sediments were causing the bricks to crumble. However, it happened with very few bricks. And from the time they found out, there was a person who inspected the carts and threw away the defective bricks. But before they found out, they excavated it and took it to the brickworks on carts, it was dried, burnt, and so on. Well, he, of course, did not know it, nobody knew it, and once it happened that somewhere on the sidewalk in Prague there were our bricks from our brickworks piled up and they were crumbling. So, they pinned it on him as sabotage, that he had done something to make the bricks start crumbling. When this happened, they picked him up and arrested him."