Karel Krška

"Lest you think there was some qualitative difference between those party members and non-members. It's not fashionable to say that nowadays, you know? A lot of those non-Party members there were acting like pigs. First of all, they were afraid, and secondly, they sensed a kind of possibility in it, because if the communists couldn't, they wanted to suck up. For example, there was Dr. Lang in astronomy who, when he was called before the commission, said, 'Comrades, I am not a party member. But this, what was going on here, was all done by the Party. It was done by the Party. And I didn't take part in it because I don't have legitimacy, but I have the heart of a communist!'"

"Now in that party, most of the people here were like me, let's say, and then there was the healthy core. That healthy core couldn't get into power because there was a majority. That if there was a vote on something, let's say, we don't allow Associate Professor Spalko to have a professorship, example, and so, who is for it, the two would say yes, and the twelve would say no of course - he's a decent person, a professional. So they solved it by firing us from the party. And that was done by exchanging party cards. And that was the vetting. First they went after the Communists, and then they went after the rest."

"Otherwise, the conditions at that faculty were like this. The faculty is one and is divided into departments, today into institutes, and the conditions were different at each. Some of them didn't have any such pronounced communist, dangerous, and there were all sorts of things. And then there were departments where, for example, the head insisted that everybody, including the technical staff, had to be members of the Party, because he insisted that they had to be 100% Party members. So it didn't work there because they had people who they would have preferred to fire immediately, not after the troops came in, so they didn't force them into the party. But I was in it. Well, my father said, 'You mustn't get anything from that party,' because my father was unhappy about it. Mum was too! So he said to me, 'You mustn't get any profit out of it. You mustn't get any benefits from it, so you'll have a clear conscience when you're in there.' And I didn't get any. Then when I was fired, I was fired as an assistant professor, just like when I got into the party."

"Dad was invited to a puppet theatre performance in Old Brno, where they had puppets three quarters of a metre high, it was the biggest in Brno. So dad and I went to the theatre there. And so I remember that two young people were walking towards me on the pavement, holding hands, it was a boy and a girl. I don't know how old they were, but let's say they were about eighteen or twenty years old. And they had Jewish stars on their chests. I liked the stars very much, so I said to my father, 'Oh, that's beautiful', and so on. And then my dad, as they walked by, he said, 'Those are the biggest poor people, you have nothing to envy them for not having that star, because they are Jews.'"