Růžena Kulísková

“After he was sentenced to death, he was in a solitary confinement in Dresden. He told us that he wore the execution clothes which had around the collar dried blood of those who had been executed before. And now imagine that, that horrible air raid came, on the 15th of February in 1945, and the prison was hit as well. And he was in a solitary confinement, he was the only one in that cell, and that cell had reinforced oor which was secured by an iron bar and when one of those bombs exploded somewhere next door, the door flung open and only that bar stayed in place. And our dad knew, when the guards were passing by, they would bring him some food and such, so somewhere nearby, they would bang with a bunch of keys. Against a table, it seemed that there was a table where a bunch of keys would be. And in that horror when the cell door flung open and the bar remained, he managed to, he had weighed over eighty kilos and whe returned, he was under forty-five, so in this state, he jumped over the bar and because he knew that the keys had to be somewhere there… there was indeed a table and a bunch of keys lay there and imagine, he grabbed the keys and some of the cells didn’t have their doors smashed, they stayed closed because the pressure wave travelled in various directions. Some of the doors flung open, some were pressed against the bars. So he was searching in that bunch of keys and he opened some of the cells. And he managed to unlock a few and then he would say: ‘I indeed opened several of the cells!’ But then there was this other problem, he had the execution clothes on...”

“And even if we had protested, we would ruin our lives and we wouldn’t have helped Mrs. Horáková. That was horrible… nowadays, it’s unimaginable, nobody can imagine the horror. When all the employees from all the companies, employees, all of them, had to assemble for example on that Old Town Square [in Prague]… those slogans, how the people around shouted them out… such faces which show no culture but: ‘Long Live the Soviet Union, Long Live the Soviet Union!‘ and at the same time they watched the others whether they’re shouting it out as well. Those were horrible times, horrible people trod the world. It’s just an insane perversion, a perverted idea, entirely perverted idea, Communism, Nazism… that’s a perverted idea, totalitarian. I keep thinking about it, it’s difficult, now, how to express those experiences so that you would be aware of that the same way I was aware of it back then. What sort of undoing this is, this Communism. How the people treated each other when someone could be disagreeing, so, the one who agrees can destroy them. And gets an award for the destruction. Just imagine this. Your generation can’t fathom this at all. They dared to sentence to death a woman, Milada Horáková, to death, she had never hurt anyone, she never said a bad word, she only kept saying polite definitions of democracy. And they sentenced her for that? She then had to read that ruling which was entirely baseless! How this was even possible…“

"The main proponent of the Nazi ideology was Konrad Henlein, a well-known historical personality and he, in the borderlands around the Krušné hory Mts., and that’s where the Duchcov area was located, so, he organised all sorts of demonstrations and at thaat time, very unpleasant situations between the Czechs and Germans arose. After the 1st of September in 1938, I was in the 9th grade, so suddenly right after the 1st September [occupation of Sudetenland], in our class, some four or five pupils were missing. And later we learned that, one pupil’s father was a policeman, and he had a night shift and they always found a police station with three policemen on the night shift and killed all three of them. So there were that serious cases, even. This was really really bad because nobody knew whether they would go to school the next day because their parents were in such a danger. Out of sudden, dad came and said that we needed to move away from Duchcov fast because incidentally, in Duchcov and in the Duchcov district, there the inhabitants were half-and-half Czech and German. So the voting was organised in such a way that for one term, the mayor of Duchcov was a Czech and for another term, a German. In that September of 1938, the mayor was German. Imagine, he came to see my dad who was a school inspector because they all worked at the town hall, school officials along with the rest of the others, and that German mayor went to see dad and told him: ‘You need to move away immediately, you’re first on the list of the persons to be disposed of,’ because the Munich Agreement was already in preparation.”