Václav Bárta

“What was it?” - “Bořek” - “They summoned me, and I could see it in broad daylight. The interesting thing was that they called me on the first day I had the phone installed, it was the first call I made, with this District Passport and Visa Administration.” - “The first call you made from home?” - “That's right, from home. So I went there, and there were those two gentlemen in leather coats. The man who summoned me was... I even knew him to some degree, as he was in contact with this friend of mine. And this Passport and Visa Administration director left, this chief or what, and there was just this man. He told me: 'My name is Berka, I would like to ask something from you.' And I told him, as I knew already, of course, I learned from my friends who got in trouble, so I told him: 'There's a problem, you know, as I would give everything away, as I just talk too much.' He said: 'That's not the case, I don't want you to ask... if you would come back from abroad... as you do go abroad from time to time, right?' And I said: 'Sure I do, as I have this job at the Passport and Visa Administration.' 'You know, we would like to ask you... I don't want you to report anything, we just need your help.' I said: 'How?' Then, for a while he would explain to me how the world was divided, and they, as intelligence officers, were just doing their job, and part of that job was that they communicated with people from the West, or maybe they would try to get someone working for them, and he told me: 'We need you, when you will go abroad, to buy some paper. Some notepaper, as if we would use our notepaper, it would be...' And I said: 'I could do that, I guess.' At that time, my brother - he is also on that list – who was in Pilsen, who would go abroad with his ensemble. Well, before that, I was abroad twice or so, in the 1970´s, with this ensemble from Horní Bříza. It was a folklore ensemble, I was directing their performances, so they took me with them. My brother was a singer in this ensemble.” - “You said that your brother was on the list – why? Was he a collaborator?” - “Well just like me, I would say, I didn't know what my title was, I just learned it from you.” - “You are listed as a secret collaborator, 'D' category – 'důvěrník' ('confident').” - “A confident? Does that mean I would have had to sign anything?” - “That wasn't necessary, to sign anything.” - “No, I never signed anything, in my whole life. I just met them in person, maybe we spoke on the phone on one occasion, and I met them, like I told you. To get some paper, some notepaper, but after that, they didn't contact me in this matter. And as I mentioned my brother, he told me: 'I had the same experience, but they told me to report to them, after we would come back with the ensemble, to report who we met and so on.' And he told me: 'I was so scared, I was so afraid of them, but they didn't call me again.” - “And you insist that they didn't contact you again? Not at all?' - “No.” - “In this file of yours, there are records of you meeting them maybe ten times or so.” - “Not at all, it wasn't like that. I never met them, never.” - “Not a single time?” - “No. And what evidence do they have? I would like to see that, as my memory isn't so bad, that I would just forget something like this. I never saw them again after that first meeting.”

“My father had two siblings. My grandmother was alone, as my grandfather, her husband, my father's father, he had been working in Horní Bříza, they called it 'the fireclay tuberculosis'... They made fireclay bricks by grinding quartz down to this fine dust. And as it was dusty, those men contracted this kind of secondary tuberculosis. Their lungs got dusty and they would die early. So they didn't talk about my grandfather much, but I knew that he died young. My grandmother had to take care of three boys. She had a house in the upper part of Hromnice, yet most probably they were quite poor, as my father told us that they had just one pair of shoes, all the boys. And the one who would get up early would get the shoes, the second one would get sabots, and the third one would end up barefoot. And from this poverty came the resistance against the capitalists who were having a good life. There was this poverty and then there was war. And what communism promised, this notion of equality, or some improvement of living condition, that also played its part. And of course there was this hatred in people towards the Germans and so, and that was also a factor. So many people who were friends with uncle Baxa, who was in a concentration camp, who came back and joined the communists, they would of course be convinced that... like many people... today, they say they were no opportunists, people like this, as they truly believed that that's how it's gonna be and that it was right.”

“At first, you could cross the demarcation line, it was just in the middle of the village. Interesting. It even went, as there was this handball field, like this line in the middle of the handball field, that was where the demarcation line was.”