Marie Polášková

“They didn’t have any reason to imprison them. They didn’t know what crime to charge them with to give them a reason - that they’d refused to join the co-op and that it had been somehow violent. The prison guard started interrogating him. A young boy, not even thirty years old. He told me about it: ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it. I told it to you because I gave you half of my property and because you treat me decently and care for me.’ [The guard] began beating him, demanding he admit he and Václav wanted to kill Bardoň. Probably based on that article in the newspaper. He punched him in the face, broke his prosthetic, which cut his lip. Blood started gushing out. He fell on the ground, and [the guard] started kicking him and said: ‘You wanted to kill Bardoň, so I’ll kill you now and that’ll be it for the trial and the investigation.’ He said: ‘How could I have killed him when he rode off on his motorbike and nothing happened to him? I didn’t even touch him. I only held him by the flap of his coat and shook him and swore at him. How could I kill him when he rode off and still works in the factory?’ [The guard] probably took a fright from that, so he left him be. Then came the trial, and they charged him under section eighty. I guess they had it already prepared for Václav. So they used it for both of them, seeing that they were judged at the same trial.”

“In the year 53, when my eldest brother Jan was in training as a mechanic at Tatra Kopřivnice, my parents bought a cow to be able to support everyone. Because we didn’t have any grounds, my father rented them. So that he’d have what to fee the cattle with. So when my mother went to the council office to get ration tickets, she only received ration tickets for Jan senior as a working man and for Jan junior as a worker in training, and they refused to give out ration tickets for the remaining six children and for my mother, claiming that we have fields and cattle to provide us with a living. This event practically caused my mother to break down, and I remember well - because when it my father’s pay day, we’d always go to the local grocer’s shop with my mother and a two-wheel handcart to buy food for our large family with ration tickets - how my mother cried when she parted with her last ration tickets and said that she didn’t know how we’d live on and that if she didn’t love us and there weren’t so many of us, she’d sooner just jump under the train that rode by the end of Sýkorec. My father, who was a tough man, hard-working, but also quick-tempered, went to the council office and told the local bigwigs that even Hitler had left us our ration tickets, but they’d done even after the war, and that we didn’t own any fields and we maintained our animals on rented soil. After my father’s harsh but justified tirade, the council office returned us our tickets.”