Maria Hrochová

„On August 21, I personally went through a terrible time, I had children at the cottage in Suchý and I was already going to work. My mother looked after them there and we took a bus from Suchý to work in Boskovice and there was such an unnatural silence on that bus, I still recall the silence. We came to Boskovice, went to the apartment to eat something and wash, it wasn´t so easy at the cottage, and I wanted to run to work. We turned the wired radio on, and so we could already hear that the troops had almost reached Olomouc. And what now with the kids in the woods. It's still far from Olomouc, but my husband called a taxi, and we didn't go to work at all. We went by Volga car, I don't know what the taxi driver's name was, and he took us to Suchý. We loaded all the children into that big car and what we had time to pick up, I also had a washing machine [at the cottage] as I couldn´t stay there with kids without it. We picked them up all in the car to take them to Boskovice, after all, the apartment seemed safer to us than the cottage in the woods. I was terribly scared, terribly. It was an experience from the sixty-eighth year, which I won´t forget. "

"We were at school, and I remember my mother picking up my sister out of the class and walking down the corridor with her in the Green School and she was just saying, remember your father was arrested by communists. Always remember that your dad is in prison again and that he was arrested by communists. That's how she [my sister] still remembers it. "

"The first time he was arrested, it was after Christmas. It was sometime in January, I'm not sure, it might have been on Epiphany, one of the arrests, but I don't know if the first or the second, happened on Epiphany. Mom took us to the bedroom. So I wasn't right there when he was being arrested, my mom was there. Mom was there and after arresting him the police officers came and searched our apartment, and one of the officers told mom not to tidy up. They opened a cabinet, swept some things out, or maybe even on the floor, made a mess of it. And the police officer told my mom, leave it as it is, because they will come to check if we did the search thoroughly, if we found something or not. So it remained there as it was for a few days. "

"Some of the visits took place in a room with a fence between the prisoners and us, a wire fence. And I know that during one of those visits, dad gave mom a ring, but where he got hold of the ring in that prison I don't know, he didn't bring it with him from home. When he was arrested, everything stayed at home. He gave mom the ring to remind her that they weren´t divorced. Many of his fellow prisoners were divorcing, and some women were advised and suggested to break free from the spouses who were imprisoned and who had committed various crimes, and so on, so he gave mom the ring to let her know he cared, so that she wouldn't divorce him. But our mother would have never divorced him, even if he hadn´t pushed the ring under the bars. She would have never done that. Their marriage made a strong bond. "