Jindřiška Nová

"My grandfather was already in a very bad way, like his father, so Dad asked if he could visit him before he died, and strangely enough they allowed it. And I remember the other cousin, like from Aunt Slava, she wasn't born until July and dad was locked up on the 7th. So she came running to us, like from the farm, and she came, because we were going to visit the next day, so she came running to us and she said: 'Aunt, either Uncle Mira is with us, he was dad's brother, there were two of them, he was a teacher, or he is your dad.' So mom ran over there, well, dad was sitting there in Grandma's room wearing Grandpa's clothes. I remember that, like a tweed jacket and trousers, and when they let him out, he was allowed to wear his bluecoats and come over to Grandma's, like at my parents' in Pilsen. They were always like Pilseners from the city. And now his mother reproached him why he went to his grandmother's, to his parents' house first, and not to her house, and he told her that he didn't know how she would welcome him. You know, it was terrible."

"And we came there and they always, when we were there, they would bring them in the bus, the convicts, they were all sitting in the bus, and I was still thinking, we're always so overcrowded when we go there, and they..., well they had to sit so the guards could keep an eye on them. And then when we got there, it was such a horrible wooden hut, and we went in through one entrance from the front and the other from the back, and the convicts always came in. And then when we had a visitor, they were, but I don't know if it was also in that Milín, because I was five or six years old. But otherwise it was like that in Vojna and Bytíz. These were tables maybe a foot or so wide and in the middle was a board about 25 numbers high and over that were white cloths, like tablecloths. We didn't know if they had listening devices or what. Well, and dad, when he was sitting there, on each side of him it was guard, convict, convict, guard, they still walked around that room, it was pretty big, so the floor rumbled when it was wooden, and they still stood there afterwards. And one time my dad whispered to my mother, 'Bóža Modrý is here.' So dad survived."