Marie Hrudníková

"The atmosphere was very tense, and we were anxious. We could tell that even our parents were anxious, we didn't utter a word in the kitchen. My brother was five years old. I was ten, he is five years younger. I brought the lard and my mother finished the doughnuts. She was still offering them, because Daddy accompanied them, and then they all came into the kitchen and- a discovery... They were walking around, and they were jangling a big bunch of keys in Mommy and Daddy's ear, and said to Mommy and Daddy, 'Where are these keys from?' My five-year-old brother started crying and said he got the keys from Auntie Navratilová to play with. This was an old lady next door who had an unwanted bunch of keys and gave them to our Jožin, so of course, our parents couldn't have known what they were for because he got them as a toy. They finished, and it became clear what the keys were for. The search also took place in the outbuildings, i.e. the barns, sheds, chicken coop, etc. We went to our little bedroom, where my brother, as a five-year-old, still had a crib and a straw mattress in his crib. Today's generation does not know what a straw mattress is. We used to call it a stružok, like today's mattress filled with straw. And the stružok was ripped apart. The hay was sticking out of it. So they were looking for that Premonstratensian gold even in this drastic way - that the strožok and the quilt were torn apart. So that experience with the doughnuts and the lard and the keys, that's my vivid memory you can't forget because it just kind of stays with you. Not as a grudge against those people, I don't even know who they were, but the memory of the cruelty of that time towards a certain group of people and that it wasn't right. Not like hatred, I don't want to say that, but just that whatever was wrong got your attention."

"My first impression when we got there - high walls with guards walking around with machine guns and dogs, with wolfhounds. They were circling it. Then there was this long walkway and something like a gatehouse, a few meters, maybe a hundred, from the wall. They led us to the gatehouse where we were supposed to wait. We were told what we could and couldn't do, and then we waited for my uncle. And now you see him coming from the wall in that striped prison garb, accompanied by a guard and his dog, being led along that sidewalk. My sister and I, we got so... we couldn't speak. My mother had experienced this several times, but it impacted us the most. And then we were older and we went to see him several times at Mírov, but Leopoldov made such an impression on us. At the same time as my uncle, Husák was locked up there. My uncle was brought into this sort of gatehouse, where there were two sets of bars, between them an alleyway with a guard. My uncle was behind one of the bars, and we were behind the other one, and in between us was the alley. We couldn't greet each other, we couldn't hug, we couldn't talk about certain things. So we'd chatter about school so he could at least listen to us. Mostly we were in tears and my uncle was cheering us on, unbelievable."

"For example, we used to fill our milk supplies by buying it for seven crowns from all the crofters. It was the little farmers who would only have one cow at home, right. So we bought their milk to fulfil the supply so that daddy wouldn't get arrested. And then we'd put it on that prescribed supply at a third of the price. So that's how rich we were, yeah. So we had to live very frugally at that time."

"How did it turn out? The funny thing I remember is how after a long - it took more than half a day, this inspection - suddenly, this National Security Corps officer came with a big bunch of keys. And he was walking around, we were sitting on a little bench, we kids had this little table, and he was walking around with this bunch of keys, and he was alternately jingling it in mommy's and daddy's ears, and he kept walking around to find out where the keys were from. We just didn't know, we didn't know what keys they were. So when it went on for a long time, my brother, who was five years old, started crying and said that he got them from a neighbour, whom he called Auntie Coufalová, an old lady who used to play with him. So that's how the affair with the keys ended.

"So they took the machines away from us for that STS [Machine Tractor Station], the basic machines. Dad then subsequently - we were a progressive family, a hard-working, progressive family - so subsequently, he made another tractor. I remember from my childhood, as a kid, when it was snowing outside. The kids at school would shout at me that the kulaks were falling. So I was like- mentally, I didn't feel good."