“My first impression is that we were on a train and they kept saying to me: ‘Remember, your name is Lizzie Malérová,’ because we went there secretly, and I was supposedly going to visit my uncle. They made us get off the train and then they did not let us go, and later it was then somehow arranged that we would go through Malá Morávka in Moravia, which was a place where people were illegally crossing over the border to Poland. The borders had already been occupied, and so it was really [dangerous]. And so we went. My mom had a kind of a small bucket as if for picking blueberries, but she actually had her documents in it. And so we crossed the border.”
“As an officer from the West, dad obviously had to leave the army, he was demoted, and he was imprisoned. When he finally came home, a month later they arrested my mom, and she was then in prison for five years… I was about your age... I had to start taking care of the household and everything and it was not a nice time...”
“In our first grade of the secondary technical school of geology there were children who had good marks and who mostly did not get admitted to other schools for political reasons. Thus I got to Prague this way to the technical school of geology. I was there for two years because it was only a two-year school. Then I got a job placement to Most and I had to go there, and my mother had already been imprisoned at that time. Dad would have never ever sought any advantages through acquaintances or such. He strongly opposed that. And so I went to Most to work there for two years. I can tell you that those were the worst two years that I ever remember. Two years later, the third-grade of the school already started and they had made great advances meanwhile, and I had to take an examination in six subjects and study all that I had missed. I studied for two more years and I completed the school with the final examination diploma, and I applied for a university, but of course I did not get admitted there... and so I began working in the Central Institute of Geology. Since I had passed a class of geophysics, we were working on aerial surveys all over the country. But after the first political screening I turned to be political untrustworthy and our personnel officer told me that if I had been thinking honestly about our political regime, I would have turned my own mom to the police myself and not wait for them to come for her, and I got fired.”
Eva Zedníková, née Strankmüllerová, was born on June 28, 1936 in Ostrava into a family of an intelligence officer Emil Strankmüller and Libuše Strankmüllerová. Her father left for Great Britain in 1939 and he worked there in an intelligence group in the anti-Nazi resistance movement affiliated with the Czech exile government of Edvard Beneš. Eva and her mother and other families of intelligence officers left Czechoslovakia as late as in summer 1939, when they illegally crossed the border to Poland and from there they boarded the ship Batory and traveled via Denmark all the way to England. Eva lived with her parents in London at first, and she experienced the battle of the city as well, but later they and other families of intelligence officers were offered to move to a country mansion provided to them by lord Eddington where they subsequently stayed until the end of the war. Eva meanwhile attended a convent school. After the war they returned to Czechoslovakia, where they were at first given an official welcome but shortly after the coup d’état in February 1948 the war hero became regarded as an enemy of the state. Emil Strankmüller was demoted and imprisoned. A month after his return from prison, Eva’s mother was arrested and sentenced to five years of imprisonment. Eva was thus growing up marked as a daughter of political prisoners and she faced troubles in her studies as well as when searching for a job. Eventually she completed a Secondary Technical School of Geology in Prague and in 1958 she married former political prisoner Jaroslav Zedník. At present she lives in Chotutice on the farm where her husband was born.
