Zuzana Bílková

"My mother was pregnant with me, which must have been very difficult for her in prison. She went through harsh interrogations, as in she was interrogated for two nights straight with no sleep and almost no rest. She had open tuberculosis, as it was called at the time. She was born in 1921, she was on total deployment at Avia and got pneumonia. She suffered from complications, I can't say exactly what. Then she had pulmonary edema and then developed tuberculosis. In 1954, President Zápotocký announced an amnesty for female political prisoners who were mothers with children or seriously ill. She was both. So she came home on 16 November 1954."

"The labour went so bad that even though it was a Sunday, they got the prison commander to give permission for my mother to be taken to Apollinář where I was eventually born, albeit with a guard on standby. Mummy had a guard behind her head. When it was two o'clock, they put us in the Black Mary and took us back to Pankrác, where there was a ward for newborns. That's good too... Remember, there was no Nusle Bridge yet, so we drove all over Prague to get back from Apolinář to Pankrác."

"They then called us and we went to the prisoner who was often behind glass or a wire mesh. The prison in Bory had a small playroom for children in the waiting room, which still fascinates me. There was a little tin airplane and those wooden blocks that you know, that you can put together into pictures, so that children wouldn't get bored while waiting for their dads or moms or other relatives. To this day I still find it very ironic."

"Sadly, my parents' health was impaired. My mother came home under amnesty when I was three years old, on 16 November 1954; grandmother wrote that down carefully. She came back with active tuberculosis, and she was treated for it in two sanatoriums around Bohemia for the next three years. The last was in Žamberk near Hradec Králové where she underwent the same operation as President Havel did with cancer, only she had tuberculosis. They basically took a piece of her lungs away to save her. My father came back from prison after nine years with impaired eyesight, which was not treated at all, and in the end he had only residual vision."

"The birth somehow didn't go well the day I was born. You know, we called it a joint at home, not a prison, but a joint. It was a Sunday, and the prison warden, as my mother always told me, allowed my mother to be transferred to the maternity ward at Karlov where I was born that afternoon. I lived with my mother for about two months in the prison at Pankrác after that, but then I got sepsis, or blood poisoning, because of course there were no conditions for a small child of two months, and thanks to my grandparents, my mother's parents, who guaranteed to take care of me, even though they were over sixty years old, I was released from the prison - in quotation marks I should say - to a sanatorium in Podolí."