„But we soon got used to the studying and the school was interesting to us as well as the practice, except that there was a lot of noise in the weaving room and cotton dust that settled on the hair like cotton wool. But the stumbling block was the teacher. She was a great comrade, a class fighter. On the first day she stopped me in the hallway and said she knew our father was in prison. I thought she was some old social democrat because she was about sixty, so I nodded with a smile, and she stopped and left me alone. But in the following days it became clear. She assigned us extra cleaning jobs until the other girls started to notice. My defensive reaction was a bit of insolence. When she barked at me and said 'Will you do it?', I looked down on her for a while, she was about a head smaller, and then slowly answered. She was always red with rage. It also happened that, for example, a song to the tune of Škoda lásky was popular among the girls: 'Black Johnny creamed his shoes, he splurged on the road with his jeep, black Maggie...' Suddenly the teacher spoke up behind me: 'I hear black magic. Western imperialists are sending their agents to use black magic to win over our citizens.' It took me a while, I didn't know why she was saying that, and a while before the other girls and I convinced her that it was Black Maggie. That's how she once dared to say: 'Your father is a traitor to the country.' So I gritted straight through my teeth: 'What did you say? You insulted me and my father.' And from then on she gave peace.“
„In the beginning, we saw my father only through the bars and through the wire mesh during visits. But after Stalin's death it got better, the visit lasted an hour and we sat at a wide table, actually two narrow tables behind each other, and we could shake hands. We sat on one side and my father and the warden sat on the opposite. We could only talk about family matters. If the supervisor didn't like something or didn't enjoy it, he would tell us to talk about something else. We always looked forward to that and then we talked about how our father looked, how he made faces when we said this or that. We mostly told him good news about school or even about the family." "Did it ever happen that your mother was too tired or didn’t have money, so that she didn't want to go or just didn't? That she decided that it was not possible to go to Slovakia with you?" - "We always went and my mother borrowed money and said that it would be Christmas now and there would be no presents, but that we were going to see our father. And of course we took it, that was clear to us. We usually didn't get presents even at Christmas, because my mother said: 'I'll buy food so that we can have a good time'. And maybe we got a radio. That was such fashion, pretty.“
„In the beginning, political prisoners were put aside so as not to infect the others with their views, but later, when the guards no longer knew how to deal with the youth or with the criminal cases, then they put them together, which was probably not pleasant to be with, for example, a murderer or criminal cases. But there were many priests or even intellectuals. Dad said that the prisoners, for example, plucked feathers. When the warden wasn't paying attention, they could talk or debate. Those were interesting conversations. When, for example, he didn't meet the standard and was in solitary confinement, the so-called one where he couldn't even sit down because it was folded up, the bunk bed, he said that he had thought about how he would rebuild the house. Because he couldn't accept the situation. he was in“
Ludmila Skřivanová, born Veverková, was born on August 8, 1944 in Mladá Boleslav as the twin sister of Emílie. Her mother, also Emílie, born Bulířová, came from a Czech environment in Liberecko. Her father Josef, although he studied geography and history at the university, became a journalist and politician devoted to the ideas of social democracy. During the protectorate he was twice convicted and imprisoned by the Nazis. Already in May 1945, the first issue of the newspaper Stráž severu was published in Liberec under his leadership. He wrote articles supporting German anti-fascists who were threatened with deportation and criticised the situation in the border areas. After the liberation, he was elected as a member of the National Assembly for the ČSSD, after the coup in February 1948 his mandate was revoked, he was dismissed from the editorial office, kicked out of the journalists’ union, and after the forced merger of the ČSSD with the Communist Party, he was expelled from the party. In June 1950, together with other representatives of the Liberec Social Democrats, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Four years later, the trial was held again. Josef Veverka was sentenced to life imprisonment, later his sentence was reduced to 21 years. Ludmila remembers how she followed her father, mother and three other siblings to all the prisons he had been through. Mom instilled in the children pride in the values for which their father was in prison for 17 years, as well as respect for these values. RNDr. Josef Veverka was released in 1964, when all his children were adults. The regime took revenge on them: they were not allowed to study, they were not allowed to travel. In 1968, Dr. Veverka was actively involved in the restoration of the Social Democratic Party, he was also the chairman of K 231 in Liberec. He died in 1971 as a result of many years of imprisonment and persecution at the beginning of normalisation. Daughter Ludmila accepted the Václav Benda Award in memoriam on behalf of the family, as a tribute to the longest-imprisoned Czech journalist, for which he was nominated by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR). Ludmila’s mother, the brave Emílie Veverková, wrote a valuable book of personal memories of her husband’s life and hers under the title I would shake his hand again!
