"The story, which remotely concerned my family, happened in 1955. My cousin's husband had an aunt in Vienna. She came to the Spartakiada, and everyone wanted to see her and say hello to her. "But my aunt confided that she had the legitimation of the Communist Party of Austria. They became cautious and agreed not to discuss politics at all in front of the aunt. They found it strange that a neighbour had befriended the aunt, taking her on trips and so on. When Auntie left, they arrested her nephew, interrogated him for a week, did an incredible search of the house, threw dishes out of the cupboard, books, a big search for something. They confiscated nonsense, like the Bible, and nobody knew why. All the families she was with were questioned. When one of the participants in the execution came, among others, the chairman of the national committee, Vítek, was there. The one State Security officer who was with them was a family friend. My cousin asked him what was going on when he came to return the confiscated things to her. They didn't talk politics at all. The acquaintance just told her, 'Forget that you have an aunt in Vienna.' So, they found out it is connected to visit of the aunt. The cousin's husband came back from the interrogation a completely devastated man, afraid to walk down the street, afraid of being followed. He spoke in whispers at home, and when the doorbell rang, he panicked. Mentally, the interrogations had completely depressed him. At work he once said that the guys who came in as apprentices were paid more than him. His supervisor told him that a criminal was not entitled to any higher salary at all, even though he was getting on in years and had years of experience. It was only years later that a neighbour told his cousin not to be angry with him because he said that a woman whom he must have passed off as a relative had come to his house and installed a listening device in a room adjacent to their flat. It was funny because it was a bedroom, and I really don't know what they could have learned in that room. Years later, an acquaintance was listening to Free Europe. They were reporting Františka Wichterlová as an agent, and that was the aunt from Vienna. She was useless as an agent."
"Antonín Velický was a priest who refused to accept Josef Skalík as his godfather, who was a partisan and left the Church. His colleague asked Skalík to be his son's godfather in the church. I guess they didn't have it all figured out in their heads at that time. Antonín Velický refused such a godfather, which is understandable. Skalík was very angry and declared that he would make sure that Velický would never see Rožnov again. And he did. Velický's parish priest was arrested, for what reason I don't know. It must have been something other than the refusal of the godfather. Josef Skalík later lost his eyesight in a motorcycle accident. People were convinced that this was divine punishment."
"I have a memory of 1959, when I was already in Rožnov, but I was living it with my family. In Bystřice, ten years of the founding of the pioneer organization were celebrated. None of us were in the Pioneer, it was a celebration in the racing club of TON back then. In the hall were all the pioneers, representatives of the national committee, teachers, it was a big celebration. They had a bonfire ready, which was somewhere on Bartovec, that's the hill behind Bystřice. My youngest brother and his friends, as boys do, lit the bonfire. Prematurely. Because my brother had matches, the blame fell on him. It was horrible because he wasn't a pioneer himself and he lit the pioneers' bonfire. At the celebration, he was publicly judged in the hall. A twelve-year-old boy stood on the stage and all the adults around him were condemning and judging him. The only one of the teachers who had the courage to speak up at that time was the teacher Zdeněk Doležal. He was an athlete, he taught PE. He said that it was a boy's game and not to fool around. This event, however, was etched in the memory of the people of Bystřice, because many years later, the daughter of Mr Parák, who now lives in Rožnov, had the name Slavický associated with that trial and the lighting of the bonfire. My mother bore it hard because she found it humiliating and inhuman when a twelve-year-old boy was tried in front of the people as a criminal and arsonist."
Doubravka Vejmelková, born Slavická, was born on 12 March 1940 in the wartime town of Bystřice pod Hostýnem, a town around which the Clay-Eva paratroopers operated. Her memoirs detail the neighbourly relations between Czechs and Germans in Bystřice, the help to the partisans and the unassuming heroes of the wartime. Although she grew up in Bystřice, she felt more like a Wallachian and often returned to her mother’s birthplace, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. It was there that she lived most of her adult life, experiencing the changing of coats after 1968 and 1989, remembering the State Security wiretaps and her father’s dismissal from his job, for which there was no obvious reason. Both brothers emigrated before 1989, so she visited them in Canada and the US and, she says, apart from some interrogations, was never prosecuted for having brothers in the West. As a guide at the Wallachian Open Air Museum, she gravitated towards history and as a local patriot, she later followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, Josef Tvarůžek, the Rožnov chronicler and archivist, and published several volumes of memoirs and stories from Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.
