Ing. Jan Loučím

“It started in seventy-one. We had no idea that they had taken our letter to our sister from Bo. Maybe he didn’t tell her or maybe she didn’t let us know. All of the sudden we could see the dark clouds gathering around us. One of our acquaintances told us: ‘Watch out, guys. You’re being watched.’ Even today I still don’t know if that acquaintance was an agent or not. In any case, after about two or three months we found out when a friend was called up to be interrogated that they knew everything. The worst part was that these StB guys, these agents, gave the information so exact and so convincingly, that it was hard to believe. When went to a bar, they knew exactly how many beers we’d had, how many times we’d gone to the toilet, who stopped by the table, and so on. The interrogations happened in September 1972, when they summoned us for an interrogation to the prison in Bory. I remember how mom, when she read it, how she prepared for us on the morning we went there – it was after some film contest in Cheb – some food so we’d be calm there and not get all fired up for some reason. Being just twenty-three-year-old boys we were a little energetic back in those days. We were seen by Koranda and Fremr. I’ll allow myself to say these names because I will never forget them. And I think it’s important that everyone hears these names. They were waiting for us in front of the gates to the Bory prison and then they led us, led us, led us. Then they knocked on one door, then a second one, then a third and then they took each of us to a different space. They didn’t stop asking us questions. It was interesting that as soon as we finished this interrogation, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, the doors open up and we saw their colleague, their superior. It was obvious that he’d been listening to what we’d been saying in the other space.”

“In 1972 my brother and I had trial for defamation of the republic abroad. It all happened when in 1971 we wrote our sister a letter saying that it made us angry that everything at home was so lame and how we would like to travel around the world. We handed this letter off to her friend Bo, while he was here on a visit. Whenever our sister or brother-in-law’s students or colleagues from Sweden traveled here for vacation, we showed them around the republic. We gave Bo that letter and of course our neighbor, an informer, Mrs. Malá, who, in the long years to come would bring about our being constantly interrogated and our home being searched, wasted no time in reporting that we’d had some visitor who drove a Swedish Saab, with Swedish plates. Thus they were waiting for him at the border, they took apart the entire car and found the letter. They couldn’t get the car back together again, so he had to take a train from the German border somewhere around Děčín back to Sweden, and he left the car behind there to rot.“