Anna Podpěrová

"And one more important thing I forgot: you were religious and you were Catholic?" - "Yes, of course. That's, I would say, the most important thing, that even that faith keeps us going. Somehow, thankfully, it has carried us over. So I would say that kind of that strength... it does have to do with that hope. When I know everything's gonna turn out well, I can endure anything. So I guess that mum held on... and that dad in prison - his memories... that's what supported him there. He describes it himself, he wrote about what he went through, he describes exactly the day in Jáchymov and so on. And the thing that impressed me most from his writings was that when he got home afterwards for the amnesty - they deliberately let them in late to miss the trains - he got home late at night and he was walking past the cemetery, which was locked. He stopped at the wall outside where we have the grave, and before he got home he forgave everybody out loud. He named all of them that were there and said out loud that he forgave them. I think that was a really big thing that he did that, that he didn't want to carry any hate home."

"It was that we were right. They're villains, it's just such a terrible thing. Like when they liquidated the Jews under the Germans, they weren't right either. We knew we did nothing... that we were the good guys. We knew it and we knew it before... We matured at that time, I'll tell you. We had that childhood... because then we had to go... My mother, such a weak lady, she used to go - we were like a state farm then - they brought cattle into those pigsties, my mother used to feed the cows, the pigs. Grandfather and grandmother helped her, they supported her a lot. But we also had to get up in the morning before we went to school, and we had to help her to feed, to take out the manure. And there are some things that are funny, maybe they would be, but it's not funny when you have a nearly fifteen year old girl smelling of manure. I had these long braids - and I couldn't shower in the morning. You know how it was, in the summer we washed under the hose or in the creek. Once a week, the boiler would be warmed up and we'd bathe. So in the morning we actually went to the pigsty at five o'clock - like little children, ten years old, eleven years old. We helped my mother to take it out so she could do what she had to do. And then we ran to the bus and to school - and you smelled of the pigsty. That's how I remember the boys sniffing my pigtails, some of them, some of them not, some of them defending us again. Or those patched dresses, horrible. But we carried it with such pride. We didn't bend. Dad didn't bend over either, he was tortured in all sorts of ways. He never called it off. It toughened us up against the outside world, which just... We wanted nothing to do with them. I knew very early on that I didn't know who I was going to marry, but I knew 100% who I wasn't going to marry. I knew that I wouldn't marry any of those communists, because that's the concentrated evil that deprived us of our childhood, our youth, a certain choice. Already this had affected our future life, that we had clear boundaries of what we couldn't do. You can't be like them and you can't get dirty with them. Not even by joining a union or something afterwards to get to a better place. No."

"You know, they... the communists hurt us in such a way that they stole our childhood. We later .... I remember, for example, when we went to school, everybody knew that Novák had been arrested! And the teachers were looking, they didn't know how to treat me, and so on. Some people were even grinning. One teacher, I'll never forget her, Mrs. Millerová, came to me. I was standing at the window, looking out the window because I didn't want to look at her. We were just so... well, we were just appalled. We didn't know what was going to happen, how it was going to happen. And Mrs. Millerová, the teacher, came in and she put a bag in my hand like this, and in it was a bun with butter and some salami. That was her way to say, 'We're with you.' Well, others were different. Then of course - when they wouldn't let us go to secondary school. I never had a mark 2 on my report card in my life, never, and my brothers were excellent students too. But we weren't allowed to go to school, so they tried to move us to my uncle's house here in Prague. But we were expelled from the school, they found out very soon. So we went to the agricultural apprenticeship and there they always put us on display, the comrade educator, and she said: 'Kulaks, these are kulaks, their fathers are criminals and they wanted to shoot our comrades like in Hungary and so on.' And she would say: 'Kulak girls will go to wash the toilets because the memmebrs of the Union of Youth are having a meeting.'" - "Did they tell you that at the agricultural school? Where was that?" - "In Slaný. It was called Otruby. Slaný was the school and the apprenticeship was Otruby near Slaný."

"Suddenly several cars drove up and started looting. They herded us into one room. They came to load the cattle, let it into the yard, there were animals running around, horses. In the meantime, someone had taken away our personal car, and they came again the next day to get it. They were opening cupboards, throwing things out. A lot of things got lost in the process. They were yelling at us. Of course, we kids didn't know how to behave, so we were standing there. Mummy was crying. Grandmother, she was over ninety years old, she was quite... she didn't understand why this Slávek didn't throw them out, these people... The secretary, he spat on the ground in front of me like that."

"Horní Kamenice 4. One of the biggest farms in the Slaný region, you could say. Even then, I think it was modern, because we had a threshing machine, which was not common at that time. A tractor, John Deere, and a lot of machinery for that time. However, I have memories of working quite hard and hard during the holidays, it was such a normal thing that we worked, we toiled. But again, also such nice memories, before the communist era: that maybe the hay was finished, the harvest hadn't come yet, so my father took a horse, a wagon, a hay wagon, if like... of course you don't know it anymore, but the hay wagon was quite a big wagon and you could sit in it, it had bars. So you could sit between those bars, you could have a snack, a couple of bales of straw. And we'd take the horses on a trip. It was a nice walk up the hill, because it wasn't just us kids that went, it was the staff kids, friends and so on. So we went to the Ohře River, for example, and we got as far as Budyně, which wasn't that far, and we had a swim. On the way there was an occasion when my father told us: that mountain is called that, that's where Agnes of Bohemia was born, I don't know, or stayed, and that's where it was... So we made funny, you could say, educational trips. I really like to remember that."