František Vajrauch

"I was completing the eighth grade and just wanted to become a cabinetmaker. I mean, how could I not when there was equipment in the shop and I loved it. But sadly, my father told me that, on the orders of the higher authorities in Litomyšl, I wasn't allowed as the son of a tradesman to do joinery because the comrades needed to eliminate craftsmen. I was into carving statues and stuff like that. When I got older, it was restoration - I was restoring a chair and I was longing to just get to Kroměříž to the school for restorers. I stood no chance at all and they offered me mining and metal working. Thank God I got into metal working apprenticeship at TOS in Svitavy and I didn't become a miner because that would likely have been terrible..."

"What flashed through my mind was that I was all taken aback by that. I'd never witnessed something like that in my life as a kid. Three cops came in and went through our whole house, throwing bed covers and books out... I don't know what they were looking for. They'd climb up into the attic looking for wires and a radio link to foreign countries and whatnot. It turned out in the end that it was soot on the chimney and not wires, and it was ridiculous. But still, they took dad away and held him in court. That was somewhere in the street where the cops are now, and they interrogated him and held him for almost, I don't know, nine months. My sisters got fired from their jobs, Stanislava from the road maintenance office and Marie from the district authority, and I was home alone with my mother."