Eva Bělková

"My [husband] Anton and I knew we are not going to be successful, but we said, 'We're not going to give our skin for free.' The plaintiff, Eva Belkova, the defendant Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, said that they had fired me from my job without any reason. So we took it to court. My father said, 'Don't sue, you won't win and you'll lose your nerves.' And I said, 'We know we won't sue, but we won't lose our nerves.' So we were suing, and the judge asked - there was a representative of the education department of the ONV - so the judge asked the representative, if I couldn't teach with my opinions, if I couldn't be employed somewhere, for example, in a museum or in a library. And he said no. So I worked 19 years on the track."

"When the unified agricultural cooperatives were founded, the communists tried to force the peasants to join the cooperative. The peasants fought back, defending themselves by saying that they had worked for the land they had and now they had to give it to the cooperative for free. So they laid such traps. In short, they called my father to the district committee of the Communist Party and there they dictated to him the names of the peasants from Bedihost with their sentences. And he, when that happened, was broken by that. But since there was party discipline, it was impossible to leave the Communist Party. He had to ask for a resignation and give proper reasons. He justified it on the grounds that the Party dues were too high for him, that he was supporting a family of five, and that what he spent on dues in a year he could buy a pair of trousers for the boy. So the district committee of the Communist Party accepted this and dismissed him from membership, but also dismissed him from his judgeship. So then he was out of a job for a while. Someone recommended him for a manual worker's job in Ivanovice, so he went there to ask the company, and the company said yes, come back in about a fortnight and bring your cadre materials with you. And when he came in a fortnight, they told him they didn't need him anymore. So he was unemployed for a while. My auntie, my mother's sister-in-law, was a member of the Communist Party, and she sort of stepped in and said, 'Well, the family has to make a living.' He worked there for a number of years, I don't know, a year, two, three maybe. And he suffered an accident there, a fracture in his right arm, and they had to amputate his forearm. And when he recovered, they hired him as a supervisor in that brickyard."