Iva Škrovová

“The radio would give him some contracts from time to time, as in fact there were not many people they could use. After they fired both my father and Věra Šejvlová, they had no one to replace them. Then Jan Rokyta started working there. And he would help my father, as he would let him do those arrangements. He wanted him to resume recording and collecting those songs. So in the end, my father would get back in and he would resume his work. You could say he was working incognito in a way. As his name didn't appear anywhere. His name couldn't show up under those arrangements he made or the songs he collected. Only later he started using a pseudonym. But that happened only after some time. He started going under the name of Ladislav Mistrík.”

“In 1968, the Soviets came and after that this whole mess started. It went for quite a long time and he also had been hiding for some time, till December maybe, and after that, he would quickly relocate to Olomouc, where he would be less exposed, and work as the director of the local philharmonic. And then those political screenings started. As there was always a delay. Then they started to investigate who did what, to what extent he was involved and everything, how big was his participation in this and that. So in the end, this development could reach him even there and in 1971 he was fired from the philharmonic. And they stated quite openly that he was being watched quite thoroughly, so it would be pointless for him to apply for any job, as any request by him would be dismissed; that was in 1971. After that, the most difficult years started, both for him and our family, as he had been in fact banned from the radio. They couldn't play compositions he wrote, not even the folk pieces, if they would play them at all, they couldn't use his name, so he was almost without income those days.”