“[So what actually happened after February 1948?] Well, I remember that to the last detail. Dad came home from the office one day and found an membership application form for the Communist Party. Because during the First Republic they had this principle that active members of the military were not allowed to be active politically - in fact in the past they didn’t even vote in the elections. They did already vote at the time, of course, but my father was of the opinion that they should not actively participate in politics. So he simply organised an investigation to found out who had put it there, and somehow or other he found out who did it. Or he didn’t, but either way there was much fuss and bother about the matter. Well, the result was that very shortly afterwards, a few days later, the Chairman of the Supreme Court placed on so-called suspended leave. That was a system where the person had to stay at home, he received his pay and didn’t do anything, didn’t go anywhere, etc. And that lasted until sometime in summer, perhaps until the beginning of autumn, and then he was dismissed from the army.”
“Well, and then suddenly one night there was lots of shouting at home, and then nabbed Dad. He only had time to warn Mum: ‘Don’t tell them anything, you’re a close relative.’ I saw them there as they were going through his drawers, and this one scene with one of the stetsecs [an approximation of ‘estébák’, State Security officer - trans.] imprinted itself into my memory - they were in civvies, all of them - and he put a drawer on one of his feet, and he twirled round on the other, so all the contents of the drawer as if fanned out on to the floor.”
“So Mum cam back, and... well, and then she found out that there’s a forced labour camp there. But that was a forced labour camp which Reicin had created specially for soldiers, for officers, and there were about three hundred of them there. There’s a very precise list, and Dad is entered there under number 64, so he was the 64th person to come there. And later on I saw the ruling. I’m talking about recent times, when I acquired the documentation pertaining to my father. It contains a ruling, which is signed by some engine driver and his assistant on the grounds that the accused might endanger the development of the people’s democratic homeland. That was the only justification. With that, from the context of what was there, it was implied that he wasn’t employed. But that wasn’t true, he worked well and proper - as I already said, he shovelled barley.”
Vladimír Šuman was born on 17 October 1936 in Košice, Slovakia, into the family of a Czech military judge. They moved back to Bohemia soon afterwards. His father was stationed in Litoměřice, Pilsen, and Prague, where Vladimír Šuman spent his childhood. After the war his father briefly served as Chief of Gendarmes in Bohemia and Moravia, before returning to his function as military judge. After 1948 he refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia due to his position; he was dismissed from the courts by the Chairman of the Supreme Court, and he subsequently found employment as a worker in the Pilsen brewery. Soon afterwards he was arrested by State Security and taken without any trial to the forced labour camp established by Bedřich Reicin, where he spent two years. Vladimír Šuman was barred from attending grammar school because of his father’s background profile, nor could he chose a university to study. In 1968 he joined the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN), for which he was fired from his job. During compulsory military service he co-founded Kladivadlo Theatre. After the revolution he served as a member of parliament and later as a highly-placed official at the Ministry of Defence.
