Eva Langrová

“What I remember most from the time after daddy’s arrest were the house searches. Usually there was a car standing in the street. We were under surveillance, and they monitored whom we met and talked to. When we turned off the lights in the evening, they would ring the bell and do a house search. They threw out books from the bookcase, they removed pictures from the walls to check if there were not any pamphlets behind them, they pulled curtains from the windows to check if we did not hide anything in them. After the Velvet Revolution, I made an effort to go to the archive in Pardubice and I paid a lot of money for copying the entire investigation file of my dad. I actually had to laugh, because unlike my parents who knew the Czech language well, those who wrote some of the documents s did not even know the correct Czech grammar. My mom became sick. It was a great strain on her mental health. She was under surveillance when she went to work. When she went to dad’s brother’s place, she even exchanged clothes with a woman who lived in our house, but it did not help. Eventually she became sick. At first she had problems with her gall bladder and fits of pain. Then she got flu, which developed into pneumonia. A doctor examined her. In order to be regarded favourably by the communists, some doctors would declare that she was only pretending illness. She did not have a possibility to get treatment. Eventually her health deteriorated so much that they had to take her to a hospital in Jeseník. They did not know what to do with her there and so they sent her to Olomouc to the university hospital. At first she was happy. She wrote to dad and she was glad that they would be close to each other, because dad was in the pre-trial detention prison in Olomouc at that time. Since they were both there, she believed that they were closer to each other. Children were not allowed to hospitals at that time. She underwent a gall bladder surgery. I went there with my grandma who lived in Ludgeřovice. I had to wait in the gatehouse, but mom begged the head nurse to allow her to see me. She walked out and that was the last time that we met. She told grandma that we should not come there, because it was a long and difficult journey, and that the doctor promised her she would go home within a couple of days anyway. Then they called us from the hospital that she died. Grandma wanted to know the exact cause of death, but the doctors did not explain it to her. They only told her that she was healthy, but that it was a misfortune that she died. That was what they said about it in the hospital.”

“When mom died, the family panicked, because children of convicted prisoners were usually being placed into children’s homes. All family members agreed that this could not be and that I must not be sent to a children’s home. My grandma and grandpa thus agreed to have me live with them, and thus I got to Ludgeřovice. I was not able to get used to living with them, because the situation and regime in their home was completely different. With her German upbringing, grandmother was used to living like in the Prussian era, you know. That was the reason for my first conflicts with grandma. She criticized me that my parents have brought me up in a wrong way and that I was now a burden to her because she had to take care of me. I felt worthless because she kept reproaching me for not taking after her daughter, but after my dad instead, who was the one who had caused the misfortune in the family and caused her to lose her daughter. She was unable to cope with the fact that she had lost her daughter. That was where her great hatred for daddy came from. I grew up in an environment where even the slightest misbehaving was regarded as my fault caused by my dad.”