Marie Jónová

"My mother worked at Pofis at the time, and the grammar school headmaster [Kolčava] was a philatelist and used to go there. He then came to share with her the information that they had received a letter from the faculty, basically a a sort of rebuke. Don't let it happen again, that they had let someone with religious beliefs like mine slip through to the faculty to the teaching course. That this offically can't happen, so they should watch out for that. And that's what my class teacher, whom I later met, told me, and that's what headmaster Kolčava told my mother. They got the rebuke, it had to be read out at a meeting, that everybody should learn a lesson from it, that the references should be written honestly and properly."

"I was nineteen years old, and I didn´t have what it takes for such debates with them from the legal point of view. So I came there well-behaved, to make the problem as small as possible. And that time I was really there until it was night. It was completely pitch black when they let me go. I actually don't even know what I said to them there. Because they laughed at me afterwards, they said, 'We're not even going to write down your gibberish.' So I didn't even sign anything. For two days I was being grilled, I just knew I couldn't say any names. I made one mistake in the interrogation. When I got there, right at the beginning, they had it pretty well prepared. 'So I guess you know why you're here?' And I was just looking for a few minutes, and then to say something, I just shrugged my shoulders, 'I guess I know.' And they just caught up on it, 'So you know you've done something.' That's how they turned it around. And basically half a day of conversation revolved around that, that I was doing something that I knew I shouldn't be doing. And that's how they were making me uncertain. The interrogation was classic, switching a good guy and a bad guy, just like it was in the Kolya film. I remember that, but other than that, really that first day, that first part of the questioning, they just kept involving me in a kind of self-reflection to put me in a kind of perpetrator position so that they could start pressing me."