František Novák

"I remember we had smuggled grain, it was being milled at night, we used to go to the mill. And we brought fresh flour, we had two sacks of it. And the inspection was about to come. He had nowhere to put it, so my dad–to make it as quick as possible–put it between the cows under the trough. There were two and two cows standing side by side, and there were big stone troughs. There was no room anywhere else. So my father didn't know where to put it, so he put it under the cows, under the trough. He put straw in there to cover it. But before the inspection came [...] I, as a curious boy, went with them. One was tall wearing a uniform, and two were in plain clothes. And he walked across the barn and then to the back of the barn, he walked across it, and there was the flour hidden between the last cows. But the cows had pulled the straw away, and the flour sacks were shining white. We used to put the flour in canvas sacks. Of course, we made canvas at home and sew sacks out of it. And as the cows smelled the flour, it was a treat to them, they pulled the straw away and licked the flour. So he went amongst the cows, and I remember to this day the word, 'So gut.' He turned and walked away. The two men didn't follow him. So he walked away, and my dad was all sweaty. He said, 'I could see I was going to get locked up.' But everything turned out all right."

"At work, they scolded me for provocatively going behind the voting screen. No one went behind the screen. The communists went out to vote demonstratively. Of course, I went behind the screen but there was no pencil. So I went back and said, 'How come there's no pencil?' So they gave me a pencil, and I went back there and ticked off what I needed to and put it back. So they knew I didn't vote for them, and I even asked for the pencil provocatively. They reported it to the factory. They gave me a little lecture there for a while, but I survived. They didn't do anything to me, they couldn't do anything to me. I worked in the slaughterhouse - it was hard work. There was nothing worse they could do to me than that I had to work."