“I remember his return. It was in July 1945. We lived in an old family house. He walked over the yard in front of our windows and he looked like a Gestapo man. He was wearing some rubber boots left behind by Germans or something like that, and he had a kind of a German uniform… well, they simply had to provide some clothes for them. They had worn prisoners’ clothes, and then they were given this. And he carried some rucksack, too. His head was shaved - and he was fat! He even gained some weight during those months… Americans were giving them UNRRA food, and he was thus quite plump. He put the rucksack on the ground, and my mom ran out of the house: ‘Dad, you are at home! Please, leave it all here, we will burnt it all, the boots, too, just take all your clothes off, I got your clothes here for you. Leave it all here, please, or we will get everything infested with lice.’”
“I will never forget the screaming. They tortured them in some of the rooms there, and I remember that when we went there to the visiting room with my mom, she was holding my head like this and covering my ears and pushing me in front of herself. There was a long table, and dad was sitting on one side and mom and I on the other… I could not even get closer to him, we were not allowed to. We were all crying; we did not even talk much. I will never forget the Kouničky prison for as long as I am alive.”
“Topic: laws of nature. I don’t know why we were to be taught about laws of nature in a political education class. I remember that the instructor told us: ‘Don’t you think that a flash of lightning comes from God, it is an electrical discharge!´ We were kicking each other under the desks as we were laughing at it. I thought, no way, I am not coming here. The only teacher who was worth something was Mr. Havlík, an old teacher, if you know him. His lectures were very informative. I don’t know what topic he lectured, but he was really the only one of the teachers who was worth something and we really did listen to him. We clapped our hands for him. But apart from him, all the others who were coming to teach there were Party members – One lectured about an atomic bomb – there was a blackboard, and he was explaining: ´It creeps like this…’ and he was crawling along the blackboard and we were covering our mouths with handkerchiefs because we had to laugh so much. So that was the political education we had. Ridiculous.”
Věra Erhartová, née Kubíčková, was born in 1932 in Jihlava. She grew up in a working class family: her mother worked in a knitting mill and her father learned the potter‘s trade. Her father was arrested in 1941 because he had once financially supported widows of political prisoners. At first he was imprisoned in Jihlava and then in the Brno-Kouničky prison, from where he was transported to a concentration camp. He survived two death marches and in July 1945 he returned back home. As a daughter of a political prisoner, Věra attended a so-called minor school during the war. Later she attended a nursing school, but she did not complete her studies. She worked as an invoice clerk and gradually she worked her way up to a chief accountant. She has stayed in this profession until her retirement.Her friend Evžen Plocek immolated himself in spring 1969 on the main square in Jihlava in protest against the occupation.
