Tomáš Cahel

“[Father] functioned as a man who hid and smuggled his leaders and they looked for a way to get them abroad. He was probably one of the last who saw those main leaders, or to say so, of the group Světlana in our region, which were Matúš and Mana from Francová (Lhota) and from Lideč. He hid them. I think that it was Matúš [it was František Mana] whom he was passing on in a village – I cannot remember now – to be taken across the border to the West. They were advancing for several days; they always hid somewhere for a very short time. They proceeded from Klobouky, I know that they stayed in Lideč, the last stop was at the parish house in Francová Lhota where they barely escaped. There was a commando of State Security officers in cars, they managed to jump from the back window and escape to the forest. Then they manage to get in touch with the transport. Unfortunately, it had been set up, my father did not recognize it and neither did Matúš [Mana]. The car was full of State Security officers. It was only in retrospect, when he was arrested, that he learned that the car was going first towards the Austrian border, but before Hradiště Matúš [Mana] recognized that they were not going to the border, that they were taking him to arrest him. He managed to knock the guys in the car out, but the car crashed, and he was harmed, so he did not escape. He was later hanged as one of the leading members.” – “Your father was not in the car?” – “My father passed him on and returned home. He might have waited for orders. He was armed quite a bit from the Second World War, he had some rifles and some pistols. Back then, they were convinced that one had to fight against Communism actively and with a gun and that it was a horrible regime. They already had information about Bolshevism and what would probably happen, often from people who were on the Eastern front during the First World War. In 1947, 1948 they were convinced they had to actively fight against the wrong regime.”

“My brother was high-principled and when the Russians occupied us, he said he would not learn Russian. He boycotted it. Although the teachers had to be in the Party, his teacher taught the Russian language. Despite that, she called my dad and told him: 'That boy of yours is boycotting my lessons, but I am not going to get upset and deal with him, keep calling on him, it is not going anywhere. He will get a D and that is. Just so you know it.' That is how his boycott of the Russian language was solved. So, we were somehow keeping up with it. I remember a joke from the vocational school when our teacher, probably an ardent communist, was writing something on the blackboard. He wrote something about God, turned around and told us students significantly: 'You see I write God with lowercase letter “g” because I do not believe in God.' I could not stop myself from saying cheekily that I write Lening with the lowercase letter “l”. There was an investigation, but the class stood up for me. Nobody confessed and reported me, so he could not do anything. The students laughed at his stupidity.”