Vojen Syrovátka

“When you became a political prisoner your family was either moved out, into a village or to the border, since the expanding apparatus of the Ministry of Interior needed many flats. This was the way they got them. Or when the flat was a bigger one, they halved it and moved a Ministry employee into the other half. This was our case. We lived in Dejvice in a four-room flat, there was a kitchen with a room for maid. They left us two rooms, the other two were occupied by a Secret Police family, then another. We got along quite fine with the latter. We had different opinions. Me and my mum guarded our mouth when speaking to them, especially while my father was in prison, but otherwise we got along well. My mum had no need to bring hatred into our life. When my father returned from the prison the Secret Police officer had to complete his secondary school education. He had terrible problems with maths. And my father gave him lessons, while voicing openly his opinions. And the officer held him in such a high regard that when my father died after years, he came to his funeral.”

“The workshop I worked in, it consisted of former self-employed persons or their apprentices, who had been in a dependent position in a workshop and dreamt about being independent one day. I recall an accident when one of the craftsmen got really drunk. They drank often. This was after the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald and there were still their pictures on the wall. They called these pictures ‘corpses’. The man who got drunk rose his eyes, saw the corpses and went berserk. The corpses were for him the symbol of his unhappiness. He had already bought tools, was about to start his own business and they thwarted his plans. So he threw a hammer and paint cans at the corpses. It was a quite good performance.“