Marie Horáková

“They made a German school out of where we had our gym hall. Because they’d deported six or seven big farmer families from here and brought in Germans instead. And their children had nowhere to go to attend school. So they looked for anyone who had at least a bit of German in their lineage, say a German great-grandmother, and that person had to attend the German school. I didn’t like it because our teacher beat us. We had to kneel when we spoke a word of Czech to each other. Or we had to hold our hands out and she caned us on them. She was a young teacher. One time I went to a May Mass [May is a month of special reverence for the Virgin Mary in Catholic tradition - trans.]. I was wearing a wreath, white shoes, white knee-high socks, a white dress like a princess. And when I saw her coming up, to avoid having to say Heil Hitler to her, I crawled under a footbridge. You don’t want to know what I looked like when I got out. I couldn’t go to the May Mass like that. I had to go home. When Mum saw me, she wrung her hands and prepared to give me a seeing-to. But when I told her why I’d done it, she wasn’t angry any more and she didn’t smack me.”

“[Dad] drove for Fruta [a food company - trans.]. Then they arrested him. We didn’t even know about it. Allegedly, he was to have established a group here called Snowdrop, which wanted to prepare a coup. We only found out about Dad’s arrest from his assistant driver, who came and told us. He said they’d been driving, that Dad had to stop, get out of the car, and he was taken away. He said two blokes in leather jackets came to get him. That must have been State Security. I was at the trial, it lasted three days. I remember when they brought Dad in, he had an arm in plaster. He wasn’t allowed to tell us anything at the time. But I went to visit him when he was in prison. I brought him some warm underwear, but they didn’t let me get to him. But even so, I found my way to somewhere where the tombs were. They were all bloody. I came back out of the Cejl [the former prison in Cejl Street, Brno - ed.], I was shaking all the way to Přímětice. It was so dreadful there, so hideous, how they must have tortured them. Later, when I asked Dad, he said they’d been beaten there. The third day of the trial they declared the verdict. When they gave Dad seven years, Mum broke down.”