“Daddy was working in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Jindřich Veselý, who was his good friend and who had fought against Franco in Spain, a so-called Spaniard, and who had been in the concentration camp with my Dad, was the chief of the security department. At that time, the so-called friends, or Soviet advisors, were already here, but nobody yet knew what their task was. Our people became friends with them, they were going hunting with them, going for dinners; Mom always suffered when she had to go there and dress up. One day when they went hunting, Jindra Veselý inflicted a gunshot wound to his own arm. He probably did it because he already knew where it was heading to. There was nowhere to escape, and thus he shot into his own arm. He was then using a rubber prosthetic arm, and he no longer held that office, and Dad was transferred to his position. People were then saying that Jindra Veselý had sacrificed his arm in order to save his head. Because the ´friends´ had already selected him for the trials.”
“One afternoon he came back from a meeting, saying that he was feeling terribly sick, because he had drunk some bad coffee. He went to bed, Mom called our doctor, and in a while somebody rang our doorbell. Mom thought it was strange, because some other doctor came. He said that he had learnt that comrade Šváb had become sick, and that he was going to give him an injection. Mom suspected something, and, holding my little sister in her arms, she stepped in front of the door and told him she would not let him see my Dad. He turned back and said: ´Whatever, as you want.´ Shortly after our father got arrested. (…) They used violence to protect what they had been fighting for. That’s true, but many of them didn’t know a way out, and there was no way to escape at that time. He could only shoot himself. (...) A commando stormed in one night, they did a house search. My Mom woke me up in the middle of the night, saying that these gentlemen wanted to search my room and she sent me to go to sleep to Dad’s bed meanwhile. (...) Two men then moved downstairs, they locked us up and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere. After a couple of days they allowed me to start going to school. I took care of some necessary shopping, then I rang the bell and they came to open the door for me. We lived like that for several days. We thought that this was some insane misunderstanding.”
“The Berlin Gestapo has already infiltrated the antifascists, because they tried to uncover the antifascist network in Czechoslovakia. Daddy found two of their agents, and he was the chief witness in a trial against them; their names were Jordan and Rühl. They were carrying out espionage for another country here, and they were sentenced to seven and ten years for it. (…) They were put into prison somewhere in northwestern Bohemia, and when Hitler took over the Sudetenland, the two of them, being Gestapo members, were naturally released immediately. Already on March 25, 1939, Rühl came for my father to personally arrest him.”
“These trials were obviously directed by these Russian ´friends.´ They lived in a villa in Troja, you pass by it when you go to the zoo. One day Dad’s driver told me: ´Would you like some pansies for your garden? Come with me then.´ I was just doing garden work at home, and there was a garden shop next to that villa. He was just on his way there to bring something to these ´friends,´ some document or I don’t know what. One man was sitting on the stairs there, a rifle in his hands, and shooting at birds. One by one, just for fun, and he was arranging them in a row on the stairs. I thought that this could not be a good man. How can he shoot titmouse and sparrows just for fun? The driver introduced me, saying whose daughter I was, and he looked at me. I got the pansies and it helped me overcome the shock a little bit.”
“It was terrible and it was impossible to understand it. If Dad had died in a concentration camp, he would have died for what he had been fighting for all his life. But here he was sentenced by his own political regime and by his own people, that’s beyond comprehension. They are now blamed that they had started it all. But where are now those who had gotten them there? Where are those who were involved in it? (…) My heart is beating so terribly... I don’t want to speak about it now, but I know that among those who were sentenced there were also many personal issues, among those who were at the top at that time.”
Zdenka Malovaná, born 1938 in Prague, personally contacted Memory of Nation following a call in the Stories of the 20th Century broadcast, and offered to talk about her life which has been strongly affected by the fate of her father. Mrs. Malovaná is the daughter of the prewar communist and post-1948 deputy to the minister of state security Karel Šváb (*1904), who was executed after the great trial with Slánský, and she is also the niece of Marie Švermová, who was imprisoned in the 1950s. She witnessed her father’s arrest and the hateful campaign which accompanied the political court trials. Zdenka Malovaná also talks about her father, who was interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the Nazis during the war. After the war Karel Šváb began working in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and after February 1948 he became deputy to the minister of state security. After his arrest she was no longer permitted to study, and she was not even allowed to study a secondary school; she later completed her secondary school studies through distance learning.
