Dušan Skála

"They understood that," they thought of me as the one who caused it, as they had to lead the twenty people one by one. So, they took me down a long corridor to such a small room. There were two, one was such a bodybuilder and the other was there to make sure that I would control myself. But I was in a very good physical condition, because there was a lot of work in those uranium mines. I was able to pull myself fifteen to twenty times without touching the ground in that mining uniform, with that big flashlight and a helmet. I was really strong. And he put me there against the bed and started beating me there. Of course, how to behave during the interrogation it worked, it was said among people, so I thought it didn't make sense at all - no reaction, that I just have to hold on. Well, before that, he told me to take everything out of my pockets, I had hay fever, so I had about three handkerchiefs there, some keys. When he saw the handkerchiefs, he started yelling at me, 'you dirty pig, what do you have here in those pockets?' And after those ten minutes, I put my head against the wall a few times - it hurt quite a bit. He pulled me to the table again and 'take it!' I started to put it in my pocket, and at that moment it broke. And he looked at me like that and said, 'Do you really think it makes sense?' And that was such an answer for me, it pleased me so much, those doubts - it made me completely, I remember the feeling of joy… 'Yes. It makes sense.'"

"I ended up in a jail and I was walking there in that cell. And sometimes, before that, I went to the poet Rotrekl, I sat in his room and he was sentenced to death in 1948 or 49 at the age of seventeen or nineteen, then he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then he was there for thirteen or sixteen years. And when I was sitting next to him in the room, I always had such energy - he had books there, but it was all so dark - the jail was there. And sometimes he said - they didn't even know what was going on outside, they didn't get a newspaper, nothing. He said that once he got soap in a package, that he valued it terribly, that it had been placed next to the Bulgarian flush toilet where you had to squat down, it wasn't a normal toilet, by our standards, and one night he heard such a splash… the light there was on also at night… he jumped up and the rat held the soap, that he appreciated so much, in his mouth and jumped back into the hole. He put his hand into the toilet, felt his tail, but then he no longer saw the soap. Such stories sometimes… funny, he told. Then I knew that Jaroslav spent about… I don't know, eighty months in jail… so I walked around the cell, I had my ass clenched in fear, because I realized that it was no longer just a forty-eight, that it would be five to seven years for reproduction and even more when it is printed. And I thought, so shit… Rotrekl was there for so long and he survived it… Shabbat so long and he survived it… I have to hold on too.”

"My mother was under oath - I came home in a month, to Lanžhot. I come in and they were standing in the yard, and when she saw me, she began to cry, shouting, 'What did you do ?!' He was also shouting something at me, and I didn't know what was going on. And it turned out that she was fired, immediate termination. I said, 'I'm an adult, I was twenty-four. I have a right to... ´ ‚What did you do to me… I am out of work. ´ ‚Then you must defend yourself, they cannot fire you. Because of me… because of an adult…´ I had to return the keys, she wanted me to check out. I didn't see them for about a year and a half. I don't know - it hurt me quite a lot back then. Because when you have parents and even though you have a critical relationship with them, they are still your parents. And there was a time of normalization, we talked about it many times - there was no longer any faith, no party beliefs – it was only about the well-paid job positions there. And I additionally realized many times that when you sign an application to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, you actually sign an agreement to everything. What she did, what she does and what she will do. That means dead, remarked, families… you actually agree with that…”