Tomáš Kulík

“I remember that my granddad Kulík Foma went to the grocer’s one day and bought himself a 300-gramme box of cocoa. He opened it, and it was half full, or half empty, whichever you prefer. All he said was: ‘Look here, this is supposed to be 300 grammes?’ And he intimated that the government was robbing the people. He just said that as an aside. They came for him three days later, three months later we received word that he had been sent to Siberia, and seven month later, that is, after a year in total, we were informed that a tree had fallen on him and that he had succumbed to his severe wounds.”

“The second phase started; for many, it was a phase of freedom. But for me, from what I heard and from what I felt, what my mum told me, for me that freedom was not so great. Because basically what happened was what one [man] said back in the days when I was assigned to forced labour at the Hejduk and Faix factory in Vysočany. One Werkshutz there told us: ‘When the Russians come, we’ll throw these Protectorate badges away, put stars on our caps, and carry on as usual.’ Well, that’s pretty much what happened. Except they weren’t Werkschutzes any more, they were gatekeepers, then they were the People’s Militia, and so on. But the freedom... we actually choked on it to begin with. But I could still see, I could sense that we were headed into what my mum told me about Russia, the Soviet Union, and that’s what happened in the end.”

“Four blokes stormed in[to our home]: ‘Hand over all the weapons and seditious material you have here, right now!’ They turned our flat inside out, they left Grandma in the kitchen, I was sitting there [in the bedroom]. They started looking through everything. They confiscated a stack of books this big and all my documents. Even under the circumstances, I found some moments hilarious, say, when they found typewritten copies of some English texts, which I had for my final exams. They showed them to me and said: ‘This here will ruin you!’ They were just ordinary textbooks. They tried to intimidate a lot, one of them kept saying ‘khorosho, khorosho’. So I spoke Russian at him, but he didn’t know a word more.”