“For the longest time I had no idea why uncle had been in jail. We never really talked about it at home. The Freedom Train took place in 1951 and in 1953, there was the trial in Pilsen. My mum recalled that they had bussed some factory workers for the trial, who were shouting ,Shame!’ and ‘Traitors!’. In the same year, my grandmother died, that is my mom’s mom, and they didn’t tell him so as not to upset him. When my mum and her other brother went to attend the trial, they were able to meet him, and apparently, he somehow recognized that his mum had died. He was put in prison. He did several years in Leopoldov prison and in 1960, there was a general amnesty, and he was pardoned. I didn’t really know why he had been in jail, all I knew was it had some link to the Freedom Train. Nevertheless, I kept wondering why he ended up getting the third highest sentence, treason and 25 years in jail, when he hadn’t even travelled on the train.”
“Many of his friends and colleagues from work fled the country. Our father often remembered how after the coup, they captured him one day and took him to Ďáblice cemetery and they threatened him at gunpoint to start reporting on people. Another reason why they captured him was, he had been a Social Democrat, and when Social Democracy merged with the Communist Party, many people refused to join – and so did my father. I remember my father recalling, they kept dropping the Party application form down his mail box.”
“I remember the situation only vaguely. I know it was cold. He turned up wearing a hat – in those days, all men wore hats – and he was all grey. My memory of that day is in shades of grey, but when it was exactly and how, that I don’t remember. It must have been already late spring, early summer, as it was quite warm. They took him away wearing summer clothes. He came back wearing sandals and short sleeves.”
Marie Homolová was born on September 24, 1946, in Prague. Prior to World War II, her father Josef Trávníček had been a high-standing official in the Central Economic Cooperative (“the Kooperativa”), where he continued working even after the war. Due to his contacts with influential Agrarians who had fled the country, he was being monitored and put pressure on by State Security. In 1955, in a show trial, he was sentenced to one year of forced labour at the Bytíz camp. Marie Homolová’s uncle Josef Radvanovský had been the general manager of Czechoslovak State Railways and assisted the mass-escape of emigres by the so-called Freedom Train. In 1953, he was sentenced to 25 years for treason. Marie graduated from secondary school in 1964 and started studying journalism. She was in the Netherlands when the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. With her then-boyfriend and future husband Oleg Homola, they returned to Prague. She got her degree in 1972 and then started working for the “Družstevník” (“Co-op Member”) magazine. In the 1980s, she became an editor in the “Vlasta” magazine. After the Velvet Revolution, she was an editor in the “Lidové noviny” (“People’s Herald”) and the “Mladá fronta dnes” (“the Young Front daily”). Her sons Matěj and Jan founded the popular band Wohnout.
