Blanka Homolková

“And they told me that obviously, they would tell me only truth. So I asked whether my father was shot from the front or from behind and they told me that from the front. So I took out that shirt which the cleaner had brought us secretly in 1952 and I told them: ‘Look, there’re this many holes in the shirt on its back and only two on the front, these bullets probably went through.’ I also told them that the gossip has it, or that it was said to us by the people who at the time of the event during which my father lost his life worked on the nearby field because it was at the time of harvest, and they showed us that father, after he had been hit for the first time, fell to the ground after the first round of the submachine gun shots, and then he got up, and showed what, which was said to us later, was a sign for Cease the fire, and then they shot another round which proved to be lethal.”

„He met three men who stopped him and he then informed his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Kaválková, with whom we shared a house, that these three men, they were no saboteurs from Poland, they were men who, like, pretended to be saboteurs and dressed like them. And he said. ‘Mother, this is not a hunt for saboteurs, this is hunt for me and I will probably be arrested for not having arrested those alleged saboteurs but I was outnumbered, I was alone against three persons.’ This happened on Thursday on the 31st of August. On the 1st of September on Friday, he came home in the middle of the day, he drove up the steep path which was not meant for traffic, he changed his clothes, he stucj a number to his motorbike. He said, when mother was reprimanding him for driving on such bad paths, so he said: ‘Alas, I did not have an accident and did not break any bone, maybe it could have saved my life.’ That was his explanation. This happened on Friday around three in the afternoon, he left for work and it was the last time when we saw my father. On Saturday afternoon, around one, several men came to our house to inform us that during a raid aimed to arrest the alleged saboteurs, my father was shot dead by accident.”

„The Communist Party committee was summoned and the head of the subcommittee for education, which was the some thing as the Revolutionary Trade Union, but for employees of the cooperatives, and they summoned me and that Comrade Vybíral said that I need to be punished immediately for my hostile attitude towards our republic and that he proposes that I be transferred to work in the mines. So, the Manufacturing Cooperative Druteva actually employed people with chronic health issues and that was what I had because I had unstable shoulder, so he [the head of the committee] told him that no way, nothing like that, they don’t have a workplace like that, so he tuned it down, that I need to be transferred to manufacturing, that I cannot work in the administration because of my hostile attitude towards our state. Then the head of the subcommittee for political education, who was an important and active member of the Party, and on top of that, he was blind, so he said that he disagrees, that I only wanted to find about my father’s death, that I was not given a satisfactory explanation. Thus he is not surprised that I have my reservations towards their attitude and that he disagrees that I be punished in any way.

„Right in the first year, I was elected to the school committee of the Czechoslovak Youth Union. Then, when I was in the fourth year and reached the age of 18, my teacher, Mr. Fiedler, summoned me and told me to sign the application for the Communist party candidate. And I told him that I am absolutely refusing to do this because I do not have enough life experience to be a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and that I’m actually traumatised by that unexplained death of my father and for this reason, who had been very active and he had been in the Party even before war, and that I want to focus on my job and my family and that for me, it is certainly a good learning experience for why I never want to get involved with any political party at all. A few days passed and that teacher Fiedler, he called and told me that the school got it assigned as a task of the Party, to gain me for them, and that with my bad attitude, I am threatening him as a teacher, the school princilap and if I do not do it, if I don’t sign, I’m not a threat to them but to myself and that he’s telling me openly that if I don’t sign, I can rest assured that not going to graduate.”