Jana Soferová

„They jailed my dad because he actually did his job. A friend came to him and asked him to sell him some paper so that he could copy flyers. That was the reason why they jailed him. They arrested him on the 11th of August in 1949. Mum’s brother and his children were visiting. Jitka was one year junior, Leoš was two years younger. In the evening, I was lying in bed and I heard some rattle. In the morning, they told me that daddy had to leave in a hurry and that aunt is making fruit preserves and that I should go and help her. So I left with my uncle for Pardubice. They didn’t tell me that he was jailed. I only found out that my father had been imprisoned when I returned back home at the end of the holiday and was about to go to school. It was a terrible feeling. I was ashamed, I had this feeling as if my father had murdered someone. I did not know what he had done. They told me that he had done nothing bad. When I met a cop on the street, I was beside myself with dread. It was better at school because there were three of us whose fathers were in prison.”

born in October. We left for Bulgaria by train. We were renting a room, I remember that we lived in the countryside. I heard that they had to have the dogs killed so that it would be quiet there. The local people let us live in their place while their whole family was squeezed in one room. They were really nice. At that time, Russians came to Czechoslovakia, the occupation started. Bulgarians came alongwith thhe Russians. But they were nice to us. They let us listen to the radio, they tuned in the Radio Free Europe. They lend us a radio so that we would know what was going on. It was a horrible situation, we had our six-year-old son with us but the two-year-old daughter was back home with grandma. When we were supposed to go home, it was not possible. We were lucky that the East Germans were not supposed to stay in that place right after us. They wouldn’t let us home, there were no trains going. We had to wait for a week, we did not know what would happen. The local lady told me that we could stay, that I could work at the chicken farm with her. My son was supposed to go to the first grade and he started school a bit later. The journey back home was interesting. At that time, the trains didn’t go via Romania but through Yugoslavia. When we stopped there, there were people from the Red Cross waiting and they would give us milk, they even gave cigarettes to the men. They were weeping and worried what we were getting into. When we saw that, we were terribly scared.”