Ladislav Kratochvíl

“Of course they were bent on getting money out of UNRRA, because there was still quite a lot of money left at that point. Jan Hudec – as he was a Christian – didn’t want to give them the money. He arranged for the money to be distributed among the villages in the area. Thus they bought an ambulance for Rozstání, which was immensely progressive accomplishment for the time, as it was parked here and was available to be used by the other villages. So whoever needed an ambulance in the area, it was at disposal here. One guy from the village was driving it. It drove them completely mad because they had failed to have their way. As they would usually have the final say here, it was hard for them to digest. It goes without saying that they ridiculed themselves by this boasting behavior. I, as an eighteen-year-old, found them to be funny. These leaflets – it’s hard to say who came up with this whole idea. They appeared all of a sudden. It read: ‘Appreciate the communists as they will be gone’. It was a joke, we thought it to be funny. At some music event, I put it into the pocket of one guy. This is how we would spread these leaflets. Of course, they then exaggerated the seriousness of the leaflets. Another initiative of ours was a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Prague that we sent. In this letter, we demanded free elections. We knew that the American embassy was the only place it still made sense to send it to.”

“They would interrogate us all night long. They kept asking about our alleged escape plan. I didn’t know about anything of that sort. The interrogators were a secret police guy a woman. They would yell at us without a pause and that had would bash my head against the floor. She also relished in describing how they would hang me. I kept telling her that I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. They would torture us for an hour or so in the office that was extremely hot and then they would kick us outside into the teeth-chattering cold. As we were standing outside in the cold at about two o’clock in the night, one of the four guards, who were guarding us with machine guns, said: ‘Why do you shake? Are you cold’? One of the prisoners, who had a broken arm, probably couldn’t take it anymore and said yes. The guard ordered him to bury himself into the snow. Thus my brother had to bury him into the snow. In short, it was a bullying parade. They kept torturing us until, say four o’clock in the morning when a truck came and took us to Vykmanov, which was the headquarters. There they put us into the correction cells, where we spent another fourteen days. Nobody bothered to tell us anything, no explanation was provided to us.”

“When we came back to Rozstání, the house was in a complete mess. It came as a shock to us. It was terrible. They had blown up the bridge in the village and one the pillars had come through our roof, so it got stuck right in the middle of our house. My mom didn’t want to go back and neither did I. I had already made friends there and now I had to leave them again. The village was in a destitute condition. The bridge blown up, it was basically a single great crater. Our fields had overgrown with thistles. But my dad had made up his mind that we’d go back, so we went back. We had to fix everything, put everything back into order. The whole first year we had to toil every day to get it done. My dad bought a horse from the Russians that he used for ploughing the field. It was a terribly tough job but we made it.”

“After we came back from prison, we had to report at the municipal office. I had to come there with my mother and put my signature on a document that said that I’d join the farms collective. We entered the room and there were two guys in there. The name of both of them was Král. One of them was in charge of the office and the other one was his assistant. Both were, of course, party members. They were not the only ones sitting in the room. So we opened the door and Král said: ‘Well, this will be real easy, Francka, you’ll sign this. You’ll enjoy being in the farms collective.” However, my mother said she didn’t need to be in the collective. I told him that we’re meeting all supply quota and that we didn’t see a point in joining the collective. Král replied: ‘Come on, you don’t wanna go back to prison do you?’ So I didn’t really have a choice. I could choose between joining the farms collective or going right back to prison.”