“They kept their spirits up by the fact there were plenty of them. There was also a university professor and other intelligent people and they were lecturing to others in Jáchymov, when they didn’t have to work in mines. So it was raining and they let them stand outside, so they were taking wood under their coats down the mine but they revealed them, so had to give it back.”
“But I know, that there was a group and there were many of them; even a nun. But my husband was the youngest and the others were the older and got many more years than him. He got seven years and stayed there for four. Some of his friends served much longer; they got nine and some even ten years. That´s terrible when you realise that they have to spend their time in such terrible conditions.”
“Of course it was a youth imprudence at the beginning, but everyone thought that it would be over in six months or so, but it lasted 40 years, before it was over, but I would never marry a communist. My parents had a shop and the communists took it from them, mum could not get any job, so one was so biased, that I chose this kind of a husband.”
Heda Prokešová, née Najdrová, was born on 29 April, 1934 in Brno in a family of a tradesman. He father owned a shop with surgical tools, which was well attended by the Russian medics after war. Yet in 1948 his shop was nationalised and he was pronounced a capitalist. The father then worked in a shop as a standard employee. The husbands had three children; the eldest Heda studied a gymnasium and wanted to attend the high school. But due to her father she was not accepted to and started working in Karosa Brno, where she met her future husband, Jan Prokeš. At the time he just returned from uranium mines in Jáchymov, where he was imprisoned for four years for alleged treason. Jan Prokeš died in Brno in 2014 and with his wife Heda he had two sons. Heda lives in Brno in a pension for the elderly.
