Ing. Zděnka Uhlířová

"I did not go to that meeting of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, I only sent them a letter in which I stated that I am not joining the party, that I have, as they would say it back then, a faulty worldview, or some similar baloney, and for this reason, I cannot be a member of the Party. So they expelled me, imagine that. I did not do anything bad and I considered it terribly unfair, I wanted to complain to the president, even. Luckily, I got over it and I did not complain to the president that I had not done anything wrong but they had still expelled me. It was the worst punishment for a Party member. They punished me because I did not want to become a full member for reasons of faith. I never was a regular Party member, I was only a candidate for the membership.”

„When we got there… In Pardubice, we got, as I had told you, some rags for clothes. When we arrived, I remember that in the doorway, there stood one Mariana, that was her name, she was Slovak, and she stared at us. No welcome at all, they lodged us straight away in a sort of timber lodge. These buildings had large rooms, there were about ten beds or so. Boys were lodged on one side of the hallway, girls were on the other side. In the morning, we had to go and make a hole in ice so that we could wash ourselves. There was a spring, we chopped a hole in the ice and we were lucky that there was that spirng. There was no water in the lodge, there were no toilets, we went to various ruins. There were many dilapidated houses around, as the gold diggers left them. They stole what they could from those houses, from the cottages. Even the roofs were gone. Everything thatt could be carried away got stolen. In those ruins, as we called it, we used them instead of toilets as there were no actual toilets anywhere.”

„I remember that just after the war, which I disapproved even as a child, they rode on a lorry, or not on a lorry, there were no cars back then, on some sort of cart, they rode a Gestapo officer who had lived around the corner, with a banner hat read Bloody handed Gestapo Liebel. At that time, I felt about it… people hated the Gestapo and the Germans. They rode him on a cart like some sort of animal, they had him tied up. I disapproved of it. I was just a child but I was old enough and I felt that it was inhumane to do things like this. They were our enemies but I still disapproved of such behaviour. They showed him around like a beast.”

„I and some other boys went to Krumlov to the district office to request a transfer and they told us, “Comrades, so, you’re fleeing a battle?’ But then they took mercy on us and sent us to Olšov. Nowadays, there is a dam in that area, it was not there back then, just a few cottages, and uphill, there’s Žlábek. It’s a hamlet up on a hill, now it’s just at the edge of the lake. It’s some fifteen kilometres away from Suš It was in February, fifteen degrees below zero, they transported our things on some sort of a cart, we had to walk in that freezing cold. We got there in the evening. The caretaker, his name was Bartoš, showed us some straa, gave us sacks and said Here you are, stuff these yourselves. So we stuffed the sacks with straw, carted them to the barn and we lay on the straw mattresses, as we were, in those day clothes, dirty, no thought about washing or brushing our teeth, with nothing to eat., and somehow made it until the morning. And, in the morning, I don’t remember whether they gave us some food, I think they did but there was no cook… and we went to Žlábek, it was about a kilometre uphill. There were some houses which had belonged to the Germans but they were not that damaged, they had roofs, at least.”

„It was some sort of naïveté of youth. I was trying so much. At first, we really trusted the régime, we thought that the Communists mean well. We did not know that there were some blunders, they kept it secret. People talked about Číhošť – the case of parish priest, Mr. Toufar, who had been beaten to death, and at school, we made fun of it. People would use the word Číhošť as a synonym for something dumb, or for a joke. Nobody knew what it had been about. We knew that somewhere, there had been a priest who messed with a cross but how it had ended up – we had no clue.”

„I joined the Union of Czechoslovak Youth when still at school, it was compulsory. At school, it was compulsory to be a member of the youth union. It was not possible that a classmate would say that no, they would not join it. We didn’t think anything bad about the union, it was just after the end of the War, or rather after 1948, after the February events [Communist coup d’état]. But I remember that there was some unionist who tried to persuade us by saying: ‘ The Youth Union will manage with you just fine but you will not be able to manage without the Union.’ So, at the end, everyone joined in. There was no-one, I do not know a single person who would not be a Union member. However, nothing political was going on there. We had meetings and most of the time, we played a winking game. I did not participate, I had lousy eyesight so I never saw that someone would wink at me. Nothing else went on there, we just played some games.”