"I remember one time they burst in, and again a house search. I didn't know what was going on, I just remember when they searched it all and there was nothing anywhere, something was in the attic and so on. We had a couch and there was a pretty nice cabinet by the couch and it was locked. And they told Mum to give them the key, and Mum didn't have the key, she was looking for it, she couldn't find it. So she even took a hairpin out of her hair, and she told them to make a little picklock to open it. And so they took it and made it, and they couldn't do it. And Mum said, 'We've moved, there's nothing there, we've thrown out useless things.' She even swore. They left and grandpa came from the forest. Mum said, 'Please, you have the key to the locker.' And grandpa took it out of his pocket and opened []the locker and there was a gun. That must have been terrible. Mum started shaking, she started screaming, I didn't know why. It would have been a death sentence if they had discovered it."
"What happened to us was that my mum got ill, she had a fever of 40 degrees Celsius, and my grandpa, her dad, was just there. And men came in wearing the long coats and said we had to move out to the town of Úterý in a week. It's probably a beautiful area now, but there was nothing there then. Grandpa said, "My daughter's ill, she's got a high fever." And they said in an arrogant voice, "So what. Then she'll go to the hospital, we'll place the daughter in a children´s home - I didn't know what that was - and we'll take the furniture away for you at your expense.'"
"Suddenly Dad didn't come. Well, of course I remember that. I was five years old then. And for a few days we would go there. We would go there there about three weeks. And we didn't know what was was going on, and Mum cried so much. And we used to go [to the church] to the Redemptorists to pray, even though Mum had left the church during the war, we went to the little church then, anyway. Later she learned that he was in Pankrác."
"When it happened in the forty-ninth, of course they took the car away from us. Later it was being driven by a comrade from our village, who at that time was secretary of the district committee or had such a high position in Stod. And when my father came back [from prison], they returned the car to him. He got a note to go to Stod to get it. He was going back - and fortunately from Stod to Blatnice there is not too much elevation anywhere. However, on a road he found out that the brakes were not working. So then it was discovered that the brake cables had been cut. Unbelievable. And the comrade went on being a high official of the district committee for all those years."
Mladana Joklová, née Cimflová, was born on 30 March 1944 in Pilsen into the family of Jaroslav Cimfl, a Czechoslovak Army officer. At the end of the war, her parents rescued two Jewish women who had escaped the death march by leading them to the American occupation zone. In 1949, the witness´s father was interned in Mírov because of the women´s thank-you letter sent from the USA. The witness and her mother, Františka Cimflová, faced financial strain, the confiscation of their apartment, and were forced to move into an apartment with another tenant. Second threat of a change of residence they averted six months later by moving to grandfather Josef Hrach in Blatnice. There, frequent State Security house searches took place. Her father returned to the family in 1951. Despite the protests of the local Communist Party cell, the witness graduated from the eleven-year school in Stod. Later, for political reasons, she was not admitted to medical faculty. Despite her strong artistic inclinations, she was only allowed to study at a technical school. Shortly after the August occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, her father died. The funeral was attended by most of his fellow prisoners - former RAF pilots, including František Fajtl. Due to her involvement in anti-occupation activities by painting posters, the witness was transferred from research to a manufacturing job at the Škoda factory in Plzeň in 1972. In the following years, a negative reference given by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia prevented her from starting to teach at the Faculty of Education in Pilsen. It was only in 1978 that she was able to teach at the electrical engineering apprentice school in Pilsen. She took care of her sick mother, who then died prematurely. After her retirement in 2013, the witness kept on working part-time at the apprentice school. Today she attends the University of the Third Age and occupies herself with silk painting. Jaroslav Cimfl was rehabilitated in 1992.
