Anežka Lišková

“Let me go further back again. In forty-nine, when all those trials were taking place, I was attending my first year at medical school, and it was compulsory for us to attend those trials because we had civic education. I remember that there weren’t any adults there, just schools. And we didn’t even know what was going on, we were fifteen sixteen years old. I know there must have been some relatives there because we heard a lot of crying. They dished out awful sentences... Say, my husband got twelve years, and he had no idea what for.”

“My mother-in-law told me it was awful for them, when they came in 1949. She said: ‘Just imagine, they stood us by the wall, aimed their guns at us.’ My youngest brother-in-law was fourteen at the time, the older one was eighteen, and he told me: ‘They threw everything out, they kept searching to see if we had any gold.’ To which my mother-in-law retorted: ‘Oh please, where would we have gold, seeing that my husband spent everything on the machines? We didn’t have a crown to spare in our house, everything went into the machines.’ She said that when the State Security men left, it was terrible: what they could break, they broke, what they could take, they took. She said: ‘We didn’t have anything.’”