“At that time, before they caught them, they took our father to Myjava to the secret police office for forty-eight hours, and when they brought him the next day, his hair was floating on bruises and his back was all black, he had his kidneys kicked in and the soles of his feet too, so much that he couldn’t walk. Of course he had to sign that he’d never mention what happened to him and where he had been. Well, but when he returned home, because he had a small farm and he had to do the harvest. So it was enough when he stripped his shirt in the field, all the passers-by could see what the comrades could really do. His legs were wrapped in rags to ease the swelling. He was a man who was mayor of the village from 1927 to 1932. He and my mother were the godparents of forty-five children.”
“I worked at an aircraft factory and I had built model [planes] since my childhood, and my sister, she lived in Jičín in Czech Paradise, my brother-in-law was a pilot, so I used to spend holidays at the airport, it was my life. So of course I wanted to fly ultralights too. It was necessary to get permission from the local National Committee, and of course the party had to express an opinion. I didn’t have a chance. Not ever, not anywhere.”
“And there were more of those agents. Then came another. We called him Franta from Vienna, because he sent greetings from Vienna to convince us two or three times. But back then an agent from the West, who smoked Camel cigarettes and sent greetings from Vienna, well, we knew who that might be. So he didn’t respond at all, and he never trusted anyone any more, and he didn’t want anything. When he was in hiding for five and a half years, they said it was amnestied and that if he’d volunteer, he wouldn’t be punished.”
“I was returning from work and they were just ruining the farmers here. The worst thing was that there weren’t big farmers here, most of the people here had ten or twelve hectares, and these two were just the same. And of course it was impossible to miss, how they behaved there. There was one dunce running around, whip in hand, and he was driving the people away, of course they were gathering there and they were all pretty fired up. And the lady, when they robbed them of everything, she said, ‘Okay, but how will we stay alive, we’ve got children.’ ‘Thousands of kulaks died in Russia. If one family snuffs it here, that’s no biggie.’”
“So we set off, in the evening. We sang: ‘Do not hide, Czech people, do not hide in the attic. Always be ready to shed your shackles.’ Do you know the song? ‘The Czech nation rises from the grave, the Czech lion awakes. For freedom, for our rights, we’ll gladly spill our blood.’ And the third verse was: ‘Daddy dear, O Masaryk, sleep quietly in your grave. We all swear to stay faithful to you.’ So we were singing this all through the village, but it was dark everywhere, no lights at all. Everyone was scared, simply.”
Václav Maňák was born on 20 July 1939 in the village of Louka in the region of Horňácko. His father was a member of the People’s Party (Catholic political movement) and during the First Republic was the mayor of the village, his mother was very religious and worked in the Union of Catholic Women and Girls. Václav had two sisters and four older brothers, Eduard (b. 1922), Jan (b. 1924), František (b. 1928) and Antonín (b. 1930). In 1949 they decided to leave the country and fight in a foreign army against communism. However, their escape failed near Cheb, they were captured and locked in a prison in Litoměřice. All of them except Jan managed to escape. The brothers then hid in Slovakia in the vicinity of Myjava, while the oldest Eduard returned to Litoměřice and with a group of resistance fighters attempted to rescue Jan from prison. Their bold plan failed. In August 1949 Eduard, František and Antonín were arrested and later convicted for alleged subversive activities, which they were to have undertaken as members of a false resistance group controlled by agent provocateurs of State Security; they were given lengthy terms of imprisonment in the jail in Leopoldov and the mines in Jáchymov. After returning from Litoměřice, Jan was sent into a forced labour camp. He fled and then hid at his parents and friends for five and a half years. All of this was manifested in Václav’s rebellious spirit when he was protesting against forced agricultural collectivisation by writing slogans on walls in July 1957. He was in jail for four months, but the label of anti-establishment thinking led to many troubles for him and his family. Not only that he could not work where he wanted to, but he could not fulfil his childhood dream of being able to fly planes. He lived in Louka with his family. Václav Maňák died on September 2018.
