Ariana Petrová

"They didn't even have an arrest warrant. They told their father that they just needed some signatures from mother. She was already working at Abet, n.p.. They said, 'Before you go to the morning shift, we will return your wife.' He released her trusting them, without an arrest warrant. By the time they came down the stairs, they were handcuffing mother. Then he hadn't heard about her for a year, he couldn't learn anything from anyone. At that time, in 1950, there were still Soviet advisers working there, they were relieved because my mother was interested in all possible languages, she knew Russian. She told me that they had left all books printed in Cyrillic in Pankrác and that there were works by emigrants who were with us during the First Republic and harshly criticized the revolution. She could read it because they didn't know what it was. "

"My mother had a tooth resection and went to the doctor, and the doctor brought a wife with him to the cell, and now my mother was supposed to tell him that his wife was fine and what they knew about the escape. And my mother said, 'I can't say that in front of that warden!' So when the doctor was treating her, she pointed to the tooth and began to tell him in Latin that his wife was fine, but now the Latin was a dead language, so she clearly had to adapt some words and say, but he nodded, he knew. And as he treated her like that, because the doctors weren't so bullied because they were used by the guards, he tucked a butter-covered roll at the back of her neck. That was such a rarity. She returned to the cell and sliced the roll on wheels and gave each other some. "

"I had thought that I would at least have an acquaintance in the classroom, but then it turned out when the teacher said, 'Let's make a ring, shake hands.' So no one touched me because they avoided me, probably told by their parents. Nobody shook my hand and nobody talked to me. The teachers cursed me because [kids] stole my watercolors, crayons, because I didn't have any tools, but I had nowhere to lock and hide or lie on it! For example, when Mikuláš would come, parents donated presents, but the teacher didn't even take it into account that no one could give me anything, so when I was sitting there crying, she said, 'Will you give that Matoušová something?' And they didn't even give me a cookie. Nothing, nothing! That's how I enjoyed it, communism. "

"And at that time they confiscated a lot of things from us, for example a biography of Trotsky written in German, then my father was not surprised that they did not want to return it, private correspondence. I remember, it was a horrible experience, because they also shook the books, if anything fell out. They even rummaged in our toys, in our tops. They made a terrible mess at our house and the inspection lasted all day. And all three of us had to be present so that we wouldn't run away with any defective material or hide it somewhere. ”