Tomáš Sousedík

“Normal logistics companies refused, so they had to call in the People’s Militia, State Security, the National Security Corps [the police - trans.], they loaded us into lorries, stole everything they could, and moved us into a block of flats. Well, and I had a breed of pigeons at the time, and I quite naively packed up the pigeons, took them off their eggs, put them in margarine boxes, and in the block of flats in the evening, I put them into the bathtub, when it was empty, of course. And I had no idea - being ten years old - what would happen the next day or what I’d do about it. And when I looked out from the balcony in the morning, I saw my dovecote standing on the pavement in the public area behind the block of flats, which would have caused a terrible furore nowadays. But that wasn’t because the stetsecs were so kind-hearted that they wanted to do something nice for me. It had just got in the way in the stolen villa. So they stuck it out there. And I continued to keep my pigeons there - even when I was studying at university in Prague, the pigeons were still flying around there. They were fed by people who lived nearby, no one cared for them any more, but they were still there.”

“I studied in the years 1962-1967, and as a football player for Sparta I had a scholarship from ČKD. So I then had to enter that bastion of extreme left-wing Bolsheviks. I worked as head of operational planning for spare parts for trams, both in Prague and those that were exported, say, to Cairoor Tbilisi. And I actually experienced an illegal congress of the Party there, I observed it from the window across the street, through the trams, and in the night the participants of this illegal and legendary Party congress slept on our work desks in sleeping bags. Of course, like most of the rank-and-file employees at ČKD, we were on Dubček’s side, which the comrades in the Party committees in the factory regarded as an attack on Socialism, so they then made life as difficult as possible for us during the normalisation. So it was clear to me that I couldn’t stay there.”

“He had it written out like a technical drawing, the whole structure, those more than two thousand fighters, I should say, because many of those people gave up their lives, some in a very drastic manner. And some of them only escaped because the Gestapo was on the run from April 1945, otherwise there would have been hundreds of more victims. And it was stored away in the filling of the door to the boiler room, to preserve it for posterity. What did it look like? It was a kind of chart that wouldn’t catch a person’s attention to make it look to be about people at first glance, it was all in amperes and volts, and it looked very scientific. The interesting thing is that when the collaborators and war criminals were questioned after the war, then for instance, K. H. Frank specifically marked this group out on the map and declared that he considered it the most dangerous to the Nazi regime.”