Gérard London

"I first saw my father in 1953, I think it was after the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald, sometime in March. We had the right to visit every six months. It was like this - three children, a mother, a policeman who was watching. We had to speak only Czech - the mother spoke very poor Czech, but she had to speak Czech. And there was a conversation with my father, such a cold-hearted conversation. However, in the meantime, my mother learned from her Czech friends that there was something wrong with the trial. And she asked me, 'You're such a cheeky monkey, distract the cop, ask him what he's doing' - I took it completely naturally, I talked to him. And in the meantime, they made a sign to each other in some way - it came from my father, who said to my mother, 'Can you please bring me cigarette papers on your next visit?' They agreed, I didn't know anything about it. The agreement, however, was that my mother brought him papers, he probably really used them for smoking, but he worked in the mangle room and wrote a secret note on the paper in small print, folded it to the size of the paper, pressed it over the mangle to fit it beautifully , and on his next visit, my mother brought him a pack of cigarette papers again, and he took it and left the old one there. And she gradually got the whole report on the process in a year. And when she got it all, my father tells her, 'You can't stay here, you're a French citizen, kids too, you have to ask to move to France.' We moved there in October 1954 and my mother had, of course, all the secret notes with her. And when she came to France, the first thing she did was going to her brother-in-law, who was a member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party - he was a very good man - and told him: 'Now I am giving you a report on what was happening in the process. And if you don't intervene, I'll publish it."

"I was born in Paris under very special conditions because my parents were involved in the resistance against the Germans. In 1942, my mother led a propaganda campaign against the Germans in Paris - the so-called Rue Daguerre affair. There were the guards of the French partisans, there was a shootout and a few people, mainly Germans, were a little wounded there. So, an arrest warrant was issued for her and the whole police were looking for her. She was arrested, because someone reported on her. She was sent to a French prison and the death sentence was claimed during the court. One of the jurors rejected the sentence - and it had to be unanimous - that is, the death penalty was transformed to life imprisonment. And the reason he refused was because my mother was pregnant. She was pregnant with me, so I started my life as a prisoner because I was born in the Rue de la Roquette prison, where I spent fourteen months."