Jarmila Bílková

"We were there early in the morning because it was set for the morning. We went at night and slept at the station. We came to Leopoldov and the village was in a field. There was nothing completed there, as the town of Leopoldov ended, there was a cornfield and as it was getting light the outline of the prison just stood out. It was horrible that it was so suggestive - black. You couldn't see that it was these great mounds, these protective walls. It was black and there were guard booths on top of the galleries. There was somebody standing there with a gun. It was horrible. We walked there, there was a well-trodden path and we had to wait our turn to go. A little door opened and when you walked into that corridor, it was dark, and we said, well, what is it? Are we going to the basement or where are we going? There was one light bulb swinging on a wire, flickering. Then, when you looked around, they sent us a little further down to the underpass. There were four or five steps and a door. We stepped into a room there, and it was kind of half-light, too. We were bigger girls now, so we could see our father. There was a counter, bars, nothing, more bars, and only behind the next bars was my father. So we could only talk from a distance."

"As they were bringing in the prisoners, it just got noisy. It was human wreckage, with clothes hanging on them - sunken faces, impoverished, hunched over. Some were walking with sticks and couldn't even walk. Mr Hrabalík, who was sentenced with my father, was walking on crutches, barely able to move. So they sat them down there and now they were talking about their offences. And as they named them, we were crying, lamenting, wailing. Some of us called out to their parents or to the prisoners, and the judge was just banging his gavel on the counter and said: There'll be quiet or we'll clear the courtroom. Everybody got quiet, and what was inside you, you had to muffle it because it was unbelievable. Otherwise you'd be screaming, you'd lose your voice. When one wassentenced to 15 years, the other to 12 years. And what for? I just remember that when my father was standing and they were saying this about him, this offence of his, he just did this - he was signalling that it wasn't true, what we were hearing. That's what I remember."