Eva Mikešová

"I had the misfortune of having a class teacher who was a terrible young communist. He said that I could go to the JZD (unified agricultural cooperative), to the factory, or that I could go to the mines. And it didn't matter that I got A's, the working class would teach me. It's terrible when you listen to that at the age of 11. And you come home to a scared mother, her nerves are shot. So it was terrible stuff. Mummy had early menopause, she always started bleeding, they took her to Chrudim to the hospital and our dad had to come and take care of us. And one time he had a card game with his friend who lived nearby. We couldn't sleep and we said to ourselves: 'There! And dad ran off to America and left us here.' He came in at five in the morning and wondered, 'Are you kids awake yet?' And we said, 'We're not asleep, we thought you'd run off to America.' And he said, 'How could I leave you here!' These were experiences full of eternal fear for my dad, for my mom. We were always worried."

"The sawmill really flourished. We had about twenty-five employees. Some of them, unfortunately, turned out very badly after 1948. We came home from school in 1948 and Dad said, 'Kids, we don't own anything here anymore,' and we said, 'How come, Dad, we don't own it?' We did not understand. And then they took half of our house, the one where we had the nursery. A stoker moved in, who didn't have to go to the Reich during the war because our father helped him somehow. And when he got married, he got a financial reward from dad. He moved in and turned out to be a very bad man. He used to play with us as children, and then suddenly, when we went into the garden, he took a stick and shouted: 'Go away, you bastards! We ran away among the logs and said we mustn't tell mummy. She'd cry, she'd be done with nerves. But we promised ourselves we wouldn't give in and be famous. It was so much fun. Two little girls, one ten, one eleven, and we promised each other we'd be famous."

"Then there was political training. Comrade Milfajt, a railwayman, came to train us. And he said a sentence that really pissed me off, namely, 'Comrades, they say there is no freedom of the press here, but that's not true. We just don't let those dirty magazines from the West in here, because people are getting divorced, morale is going down, so we don't let it in here. They could come here and hand out those magazines in the churches.' That threw me out of my chair. I said, 'Please, can you explain to me what the church has to do with pornographic magazines if the gospel teaches morality?' And he said, 'Comrade, are you telling us something about the gospel here? That's religious propaganda.' It became a wonderful affair that I was conducting religious propaganda. The headmaster called me into the headmaster's office, and he said, 'Well, you'll take that away.' And I did. A ban came from the education department in Cheb. I was in Belgium with a colleague and we were selected for a summer seminar in an international orchestra of old instruments. It was for about a fortnight in the holidays, so it wouldn't have mattered at school. The director was all excited and said, 'You're not going to Belgium.' I asked why. And he said it was because I was conducting religious propaganda, and that I had said the word gospel in a public meeting. I had to say it. I am a religious person and I cannot keep quiet when someone says such nonsense."

"They ärrested our uncles, we were afraid for my dad, they just took half our house and we weren't allowed in the garden anymore, we weren't allowed anywhere. They put a guard there who always kept us waiting behind the fence. He had a gun. We used to go to Sokol, and when we left Sokol we had to ring the bell and wait. They didn't give us a key. We didn't like it because he made us wait, so we climbed over the fence. And once, when we came from Sokol, our mother was standing there all pale and she said: 'Children, don't climb over the fence, because Mr. Vraný, that was the comrade guard, told me that if you climb over the fence, he will blow you away. Because he doesn't know who it is, and he might be a thief.' Mum's nerves were shot because he meant it. From then on we had to wait until he made his mind and came graciously to open ."