Marie Tesařová

[Mafdo = man for disposal, an approximation of the Czech slang term “mukl” describing prisoners undesirable to the state - transl.] “When they arrived there, to Leopoldov, the camp commander told them: ‘You are mafdoes now, men for disposal, you came here, but you’re not going back.’ He said that if they killed them, no one would be punished, something like what they did to the Germans here, there was no judge, no prosecution. There he met up with priests and other spiritual elites. And he later told me: ‘They calmed me down so much spiritually, because after all that you feel the revenge boiling in you, after the injustices you’ve suffered.’ And he didn’t even know if his family was alive at all, because they kept him uncertain right until they visited him there, because his aunt kept trying to find out how to reach him. And after spending two years in Jáchymov, when they moved him to Leopoldov, they allowed him to receive visitors. Auntie told of how they arrived there all exhausted and dirty from the muddy path they had to take to get there, and then they were only allowed to talk with him for fifteen minutes under the supervision of a warder, who kept on interrupting them, enough of that and so on. And she told him that we were all in good health and that I had married, because he hadn’t been to my wedding, and [she] told him only about family matters, but in such a way that they could not find out who she was talking about, because I had a different name.”

“Uncle was in Leopoldov in one cell with Husák for six weeks, it should even be possible to verify that. Husák was retrospectively declared a deviation and a traitor. Husák was awfully silent and convinced that it was an injustice. Apparently, they sometimes put a murderer together with a political prisoner, so that he would tell on him - Husák might have been afraid of that. Well, and my uncle was an honourable man, and so the week that Husák didn’t speak to him, he tended to him. And he said they always had to call out their number, as if no names existed, when four chaps would carry him back to his cell in a military blanket after the interrogation - Husák unconscious, bleeding - they took him all the way from the interrogation room to his cell, and there they threw him in. And after [my uncle] had tended to him and given him drink for a week, Husák began to talk and said: ‘It's wrong, what they did to me.’ And Uncle said that it was the same as what they were doing to them also. That’s why no political process was signed under Husák, it was milder.”

“So the first trucks, and tired soldiers, and tanks appeared on the square facing towards the river, and people began cheering. Uncle had to take care of the domestic animals back home, so me and Auntie went to have a look and to welcome them. Well, and they camped down in the school, they took the building and only left the caretaker there. The caretaker had a daughter a year younger than myself. Later on I worked with the missus [the caretaker’s wife], and she told me that she had had to lock her daughter in, because the soldiers would take German women there, tie them to a bed, those were iron beds, and they would rape them; it was terrible. She said she was even afraid for herself when they were drunk. Zuzana Roithová, one of our MPs, describes such things in her book about what her mother's and grandmother's experiences. The Russians kept the caretaker's family there because they didn’t even know how to switch on the electricity. There were even cases where the German women didn’t survive. There were also some Czechs who took part in these acts. Like one beautiful German lady, I think she was a teacher, they ravaged her in such a way that she didn’t survive. It was investigated into by the Red Cross, but no one was punished. The one man regretted it, there were more of them who did it. He had a wife and two children, and after this situation it looked like it’d end up in divorce, but then they had a third child as an act of reconciliation, because his wife forgave him that he let himself be drawn into the raid against the Germans during which that beautiful German lady died. They had pulled them out of a wagon that was passing by during the wild expulsion. I think it was in 1946. And beforehand we also had trains going through Česká Třebová with Germans fleeing the front. And from the train they threw out thirteen dead Germans, unknown soldiers, and those are buried here in the Parník Graveyard.”