Eva Langrová

“When mom died, the family panicked, because children of convicted prisoners were usually being placed into children’s homes. All family members agreed that this could not be and that I must not be sent to a children’s home. My grandma and grandpa thus agreed to have me live with them, and thus I got to Ludgeřovice. I was not able to get used to living with them, because the situation and regime in their home was completely different. With her German upbringing, grandmother was used to living like in the Prussian era, you know. That was the reason for my first conflicts with grandma. She criticized me that my parents have brought me up in a wrong way and that I was now a burden to her because she had to take care of me. I felt worthless because she kept reproaching me for not taking after her daughter, but after my dad instead, who was the one who had caused the misfortune in the family and caused her to lose her daughter. She was unable to cope with the fact that she had lost her daughter. That was where her great hatred for daddy came from. I grew up in an environment where even the slightest misbehaving was regarded as my fault caused by my dad.”

“Dad was in Jáchymov until 1956. Mining activity was being reduced there, and he was thus later moved to Příbram. While he was in Jáchymov, we received a permission to visit him, and it stated who was allowed to come to visit, on what date and at what time. We would travel by train, usually overnight, so that we would arrive to Ostrov nad Ohří in the morning. There is a parking lot next to the train station, and buses were parked there. They were marked with a sign ‘group tour,’ but they were for those who arrived to visit the prisoners. They told us to get on the bus and they took us to the building where the visits were held. In Jáchymov it was the worst. While in Olomouc, dad would sit behind a wire screen when we came to visit him with mom. But when he was in Jáchymov he was behind a glass window, and we thus could not even touch, and we could not hear each other properly, either. There was a warden on each side, one next to dad and one next to us. They were watching what we said and what we did. To be honest, I was not even able to recognize where these visits were held: dad was in the Rovnost camp, but there were several camps. And the barracks are no longer there, only one remained. I remember Příbram better. It was a bit farther away from Příbram, and there was a huge meadow and a camp which was intended exclusively for visitors. Those who arrived to visit were brought in there from the train station by bus. They told us to get off there and they left us there outside. There was no place to sit down, no place to buy food, nothing. Some people would arrive all the way from Košice, for example, and then they had to stand outside on the meadow and wait to be called to go inside the camp. The camp was surrounded by a fence, and the prisoners were being taken in there like wild beats in a circus when they are led into an arena. There was a corridor made from wire fence and the wardens would bring ten prisoners at once into the barrack, for instance. Then they would start calling out names of relatives who arrived to visit. Inside the barrack there was a long table, and the prisoners sat on one side and the visitors on the other. It left me with unpleasant memories, it was really nothing pleasant. When I later worked in a shop, I went to sell some drugstore products to prisoners from prisons in Heřmanice and Karviná about two times. When the prison door banged shut behind me it was a very disagreeable experience for me. I can tell you that this does affect a person. Sometime just a little impulse evokes negative things in you.”