Helena Koenigsmarková

"On January 5th, it was my son's birthday, he was at my parents' house in Pilsen and I was planning to go there. I was alone at home and at 4 a.m. they knocked on my door: 'Search warrant, get dressed, get yourselves together.' There was a gentleman, the house trustee, and in the cellar there was a gymnastics grenade, I don't know where it came from. They confiscated it as a grenade, and the janitor, the confidant, says, 'Wow, gentlemen, I've been through it in Germany, but they wouldn't take this.' They took me to Bartolomejska [Street] and it started like, 'You have this child...'"

"We had to go to the principal's office and sign [the Anticharter]. It was controlled by a secretary whose husband was a very tough apparatchik in Karlovy Vary and my father knew him from that time, from the forty-eighties. This lady was a secretary at Šetlík's and she protected him terribly. She was one of the few members of the Communist Party who were in the [Museum of Decorative Arts]. She stood there at the signing sheet and said, 'Children, you have to sign this or you will hurt Dr. Hejdová. You have to sign it. She's protecting all of you.' So they were signing. I was still called Pribikova at that time, so I signed Hřebíková. She figured it out and she rewrote it for me. So yes, I signed the Anticharter."