Jaroslava Mrázová

“The work continued as normal, as far as the wartime conditions allowed, both in Slovakia and in Bohemia, in Choceň. There’s not much to say about that. They prospered, people were employed, they were very glad to be employed. I remember how they visited Mum especially, asking for someone else to be hired, and Mum thought it wasn’t possible to keep expanding more and more, but she always put in a word, so people liked Mum a lot. During the war, that is, then everything changed. Then that year forty-five came and everything changed. So back in forty-five Dad first... they celebrated the end of the war, but it was only just 16 May when they came to arrest him. They came to lock him up in a very humiliating way: they came to the factory, took his braces - because people wore braces back then, they took his shoelaces, and they led him through the town like a criminal, so people said when they saw it they cried in the streets. Then Dad was in prison. Then they placed the factory under national administration. And I remember that, I was a little girl and we lived in Dvořisko, I used to walk by the factory on my way to school, so I walked, which was reasonable back then, all us children walked to school, even though it was almost four kilometres away; so we walked to school in the morning, and then back home, which was great. There was a big signpost on the factory: ‘Entry denied to all members of the Mráz family.’ I used to stop by because they’d have a bun or something for me in the gatehouse, silly things like that, so I used to stop by. So Dad was locked in Choceň at first, then in Vysoké Mýto. Then [my] sister returned from England, and she got him out of the prison somehow... which was a whole story of its own, because there was an old tower there, and they’d actually put Dad inside it, and my sister got him out of there because some of her former classmates had returned as well, I don’t know, from the Russian front I guess, or in some such way, and so Dad was back in Dvořisko, and he had to report [to the authorities] each day.”