“They came for my father, saying they had a few things to talk to him about, they left and just like that, he was done for. For half a year we worried about his whereabouts and what was happening to him. Even some of my husband’s acquaintances tried to investigate. We found out nothing. Later, we were at our cottage when they reported on the radio that there would be a trial with Milada Horáková. They read the names: ‘Horáková, Nestával, Hejda…’ My dad was third in order so we thought this was very bad. My mom went to an attorney who defended my dad and someone else. He told her: ‘Please, brace for the worst.’ She could not even get home because of all the tears. In the end, my father received a life sentence, not a death penalty. The whole family was eagerly celebrating – you can imagine us waiting whether he would be executed. They executed some four people. My dad could not believe Horáková would be killed. She was such an honest and strong woman.”
“Various father’s cellmates came to me after their release. I was rather careful talking to them because I feared they may have been collaborators. This is how I found out about my father.”
“What did they come to tell you?”
“They told me how he was doing, where he was placed… They were from a group of people who would pluck feathers or glue bags together. One of them would always give a lecture from his area of expertise so that my father would learn a lot about the baroque for instance; then again, he would give talks on the national economy. He also learned Italian because among the prisoners he was meeting during strolls in the yard were lots of clergymen who knew Italian.“
“My father’s cellmates knew various writings of his and asked whether they had already been published. He wrote a wreath of sonnets there. Because he had no paper and was prohibited from writing, he memorized them. And not only that: lots of father’s cellmates knew his verses by heart. These were published only after the book ‘I Lived to no Avail’.”
"We didn't know anything about it, we had absolutely no idea what trial it will be like. We only learned from the radio about the trial - they reported on the radio that the next day there would be a trial with the traitors. I was at the weekend cottage, so they came for us. We arrived in Prague and the next day we went to Pankrác, where of course they would not let us in, because it was by invitation only. So we would sit outside and there we met with the various wives. (When you learned about the sentence from the radio?) We were excited. I was at home and people would call me and say that they had reported on the radio that my dad got life imprisonment. We were totally excited. We all just hugged each other and they immediately called me. I lived in Vršovice and they in Cibulce and there they learned about it."
"For instance Vaňha, at a time when you had to have a coupon for everything, he'd give us a lot of fish. So they shared it at the factory and all the employees would get something. They all got their part. Later, when my dad was in prison, they were trying to find somebody who'd be willing to testify against him. But they didn't find anyone, none of the factory workers would say anything against him. While against the one who had owned the mines, they found some people and he then got the rope. Our dad was convinced that he would be executed. I looked at the records, they crossed it out and wrote life imprisonment instead."
"Dad wrote about my mom in the book. Dad did crazy stuff save her. In doing so, she was such a kind woman. So if anyone knew about it, no one said it at Cibulka. So she passed. He got all the papers for her, a mock apartment, but she stayed with us all the time. She would not go out, stayed at home all the time. The villa had a garden and so it wasn't a problem. When the boys were little, when the raids began, so we went to Cibulka and lived there with them. My husband commuted to Vršovice because there were the repatriates from various concentration camps and he cared for them. So he commuted. I know that he once said: 'there was a raid and I drove with a Russian soldier. So I said that there was a raid, that we have to hide. He replied: A nas mnogo. 'They were used to being either shot or to survive. They didn't care too much about their lives."
Jitka Matoušková was born on October 29, 1920, in Olomouc to the family of a lawyer and economist Jiří Hejda (1895-1985), the eldest of three children. The family later moved to Prague. Her father wrote articles for the Lidové Noviny newspaper and Peroutka‘s Přítomnost magazine, then he transferred to the editorial board of České Slovo magazine. In 1937, he became director of the ČKD, later he founded a family business producing kitchen utensils. The father would hide his Jewish wife in their family villa that was situated in the Prague quarter of Na Cibulce for the whole duration of the war. After she completed secondary school, Jitka went on to study at a technical school of construction and afterwards she passed a course for nurses. In 1941, she married doctor Matoušek and worked in his children‘s clinic. In 1949, her father - a member of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party and the State Planning Commission, was arrested and in 1950 he was sentenced to life in prison in the trial of Dr. Milada Horáková. He was released from prison in 1962, after the death of his wife. In 1968, Jitka and her husband traveled to Germany, but after their visas were not extended, they returned to Czechoslovakia. Later, as pensioners, they were allowed to travel even under communism. Travelling, culture and music are among the lifelong hobbies of Mrs. Jitka Matoušková. Presently, she is a widow and lives in Prague.
