Marta Laudátová

“When I was home with my children the 1980s felt awful. To me it was like... no outlook, no light at the end of the tunnel. I would ask, ‘What will become of us?’ Everybody had a lot to worry about, little children, so we did not meet much – maybe once during Christmas. We did not watch the news, we didn’t even own a TV set. My parents watched TV, for example Austrian TV, and they would tell us something. With all those worries, we didn’t really... well those times felt like a burden.”

“Dad was teaching in Uherský Brod and they came for him at noon on 10 January and took him away. They first took him to his dwelling and then to Uherské Hradiště. He was among the very first. There was the ambitious Ludvík Hlavačka, he was... really... he must have been very smart but he used it to evil ends. He devised the electricity torture. The word got out later and inspectors came from Brno to ask what had happened. They got an explanation of how the prisoners were tortured, what they did to them... First, when they wanted to hear a confession, they beat them on the soles on their feet, and when that did not help, they introduced electricity in their shoes. They had a rheostat or what, connected to electricity, with two wires or pieces of tin, and they put that in their shoes and tortured them. When they didn’t like the answer they turned it on. My dad said it was so terrible he was praying to God to die. It was horrible, the pain was excruciating... he remembered it until the end of his life. He could not replace a light bulb – he said it was so horrible that, should hell be like that, it would be really horrible.”