Miloň Nussbauer

„My mother, you know, she explained to me that he [father] was arrested. But I was five years old, I don't remember much about it. I had a very sad childhood, because my mother cried very often and took it very hard. She wrote letters to the prison, received letters from him. That childhood was very sad, because she kept waiting for him to come back, believing it wasn't true that he was killed – that he died. She claimed, because she witnessed World War I, she said: 'Even during the First World War, people who disappeared came back years later and no one knew where they were.' So she kept waiting, but unfortunately it didn't happen.“

“There is one more thing I remember from our factory of nuclear power machinery in 1968. At that time we really believed that a democratization process unfolded and that there was a political thaw. You could say that all people in our company supported the so-called reform process. But there was the August 21, 1968, of course. I remember that my colleague phoned me at five o’clock in the morning and he said: ‘The Russians are here.’ We went to work as usual and Soviet tanks were riding through Pilsen and tanks were standing here in front of the radio building and they were searching for the radio. Well, we came to the factory and Russians or Soviets built a machine-gun nest in front of the entrance, and a machine-gun was aimed at the gate, and they were even shooting from it at some people from the factory. I remember the late Mr. Toma, a chairman of the labour union who was very active at that time. I remember that they even fired at him and he had a bullet hole in his coat, but fortunately he was not injured, although he had been putting up posters somewhere. This was followed by processes when Party members loyal to Russia who had remained in the Party (half of the people got kicked out of the Party) and those who stayed in the Party took command and they started consolidating and straightening the communist regime. But since I have never been a Party Member, I basically remained at a position of a middle-lower clerk and every time somebody was replaced in the position above me, the department boss would tell me: ‘You miss the main thing, you are not a Party member.’”

“My father Václav Nussbauer joined the resistance movement against Nazis immediately in 1939. They apparently established some group in his workplace and my father was distributing pamphlets, whose content equaled to high treason in the opinion of German comrades and he was therefore arrested right in October 1939 and sentenced to a prison term of two years and seven months. He served his sentence and in 1942, instead of being released, he was sent to the concentration amp Flossenbürg. It was a third-grade concentration camp, which meant a camp with the harshest conditions, and father died four months after his arrival there. Allegedly he died of a heart failure, as the administration of the concentration camp notified us. But father was healthy, he was forty-two, and so I don’t suppose that it was so – more probably, he was killed somehow. What is interesting is that after his death we received a box from the concentration camp, which included his worn clothes, and even his wedding ring.”

“At that time my mom attended an association which was called the Union of Liberated Political Prisoners, and liberated political prisoners and their widows were going there. She met Josef Skála there and this man later became my stepfather. He was a clerk from the Škoda factory and an official in the National Socialist Party and a Sokol leader. As a potential opponent of Nazism he was arrested immediately in 1939 and sent to the concentration camp Buchenwald. He returned right at the beginning of May 1945 and his wife died around that time. During these meetings of liberated political prisoners he met my mother and they then lived together for thirty-seven years. Since he was a National Socialist Party official and a Sokol member and a democrat, after February 1948 he was immediately expelled from all associations and he was fired from his job in the Škoda company. Since we lived in a flat owned by Škoda, we had to vacate the flat within twenty-four hours. My stepfather was notified that he was no longer allowed to work in a state-owned company. But unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – he was diagnosed with angina pectoris, and he thus received a disability pension.”