Ing. Jiří Koudela

"On the very day of the communist coup, the very next day, he went to a builder who had been ordered to build a front building, which was to be mainly a workshop. So he immediately cancelled everything and dismissed the workers and stayed to work alone. That was also a very clever act. But he ran into other problems. I was already apprenticed as a carpenter in Líšov near Budějovice and I was no longer there. And now I'll skip time, when as a university student I came to the workshop one day, I see where the puller, it's called a knecht, was hanging, so there were the puller that I knew, but they had new hefties, new handles. And when I said to my father, 'How come you had to put new handles on?' he said, 'They were buried in the garden and the cast iron and the iron lasted, but the knuckles, they rotted.' We had a stock of veneers in the attic, which are valuable. So we packed those up and took it to the station and sent it to Lišov to get rid of it."

"He handled one attack by the secret police, and that was the case when the secret police picked up a convict from prison, one who was more like a thief, and they gave him a list of hawks, and he used that list to go around and visit all the people with the story that he had just been released from prison and that it was his partner's birthday and he didn't even have enough to buy her a flower. He would write down on this list how much he got, usually it was fifty or hundred crowns, and my father, in some incredible way, would try to get rid of him, send him away. He thought it was strange. And then, and I've experienced this before, there was a trial in the theatre in Kutná Hora, a public one, like the Communists used to hold, and the list was published there. My parents were there, they were all there more or less compulsorily, nobody knows that anymore, that term. If they hadn't gone, they would have been on another list of enemies of the state. So they listened to all that and came home completely devastated. But my father got away with it by not giving him anything. But other friends of mine, like Slávek Bartonů or one more, I can't remember the name now, so they were also big Sokols and they belonged to the group, they were on that list, so that meant twelve years. He filed it as if it was for anti-state activities, that he was founding a group and that he needed money for that, he said that in the theater. So those friends of mine had their father in jail for twelve years in one fell swoop."