Anna Vyoralová

"We had a wonderful childhood in the beginning. Until the communists took over and nationalization began. At first, they let my father work as a manager in the workshop, but then what happened was that they came for him and locked him up. My mother was shocked and back then it wasn't like today. Nowadays you can't even let a child play in front of the house when they are small, but at that time my sister and I were alone in Káraný, my brothers were older and they were elsewhere, but we were in Káraný and we heated the food that my mother cooked for us. And suddenly there were gentlemen there, they were in civilian clothes, but it was just the police. We were about eleven years old, and we were completely shocked. They searched the whole house and the garden. Then one of the men went into the cellar and started to shovel coal. Fortunately, he didn't finished it. But they also went to Nechanice, and actually it was only then that we learned that they were looking for so-called hidden property. Indeed, in Nechanice, in the attic, in chests, they found ironworks, like window handles, door locks, just what the construction locksmiths did. [...] My sister and I didn't know what to do, so we got up, locked the door after they had left and decided to walk to Prague. And in Stará Boleslav, just as we were crossing the bridge between Brandýs and Stará Boleslav, we saw my father and mother, and luckily they saw us too and came to get us. Dad was arrested just then because they discovered some ironworks in Nechanice."