OSU Viktorie Mikulčíková

“I was a candidate, and now they asked me: ‘Do you want to come with us?’ I said: ‘Well of course.’ So one of the nuns lent me her clothes, so I could go with them. But then one of the men said: ‘I saw one of you dressed differently, where is she?’ When I’d banged the gate shut in their faces, he’d noticed I was different than the others. So we quickly got changed, there were four of us, and it didn’t even occur to me that we would be taken away, I had no idea...”

“...someone rang at the gate, I went to open it, there was crowd of men there, and I immediately realised: They’re coming for us. So I banged the gate shut and rushed downstairs and said: ‘Hide quickly, they’re coming for us.’ So we locked ourselves in, but they even broke through the bars to get inside. In the end we were still obliged to come out in the name of the law. We didn’t even know where they were taking us. And they took us to Modrá near Bratislava. From Batizovce to Modrá. We were there a year. Then they took us from place to place... Hanušovice, Hejnice, Broumov, Vratislavice, Poustevna, they’d keep us there for two years, three years, constantly moving us around.”

“Oh, we didn’t vote in their elections. It was poll time, an army lorry drove up, we wondered what was going on. Well, if you don’t go vote, the soldiers will shoot you all dead. We said, so shoot us, but we’re not going to vote. And we were completely unperturbed... Then their chief said: ‘You know what, if it’s okay, we’ll vote instead of you and we’ll let you live.’ We said: ‘Do what you want, but we won’t go vote.’ So they voted instead of us, and the soldiers even played us a tune afterwards, then they piled back into the lorry and drove off.”