Alfréd Plocek

"...those feelings, that amazing communist anger, when they refused to give my mother the ashes in the urn after his execution. Imagine, until her death, that was almost 20 years ago, she asked for it many times. And no one talk to her at all. The urn just disappeared. It was only in the last few years, I think his name is Dr. Kýr, an engineer, that he started looking into it. The communists did one thing that they applied from the Germans, and that was that the people and also the urns didn't have names, but only numbers. That means that the urns were completely anonymous and nobody had access to the list. Only somebody! He managed it - the doctor - he managed to put together this list of names with the numbers of the urns, and I don't know if for all of them, but in the end it's 70 people who were executed and tortured to death, seventy! The urns were left at the Ministry of the Interior." - "Where were they?" - "I don't know, they were at the Ministry of the Interior, they were somewhere, there were 70 of them. There were many more, but this, what the doctor did, I think his name was Kýr, it was 70 urns. One of them was Dad's ashes. And what he did was, and I saw this with my own eyes, he put names to the 70 urns, what people they were, and that's how he came up with my father. By the number of the urn. And it went on, they wanted to get rid of those urns, so in Motol, if you look at the entrance, there's a slope on the right side in the Motol crematorium that goes up, and they dug a big pit with an excavator and dumped those 70 urns there."

"It was in February 1950, I went to dance classes then, I think it was Wednesday. When I was coming back from the dance classes, I saw - because we had windows facing the park and it was ten, half past ten - that the whole apartment was lit up and I thought: 'Something's going on.' There were men from State Security in front of the house, there were State Security men on the stairs, and my mother said to me: 'Dad's been taken away.' It was on a Wednesday and we stayed locked in the apartment until Sunday, we weren't allowed to leave it, the cops even went shopping, and I never went back to school. They said that I wouldn't go there anymore and that they would arrange it, well, they really did arrange it and they kicked me out of the grammar school."

“And they never let me go with my wife, I always had to go alone. I used to ski and went everywhere. That way, if I said, I could go. But I didn't find out until after 1989, actually, that they wanted me to set up this, they called it a residential apartment or something, that I would be a representative of the company. And that I would be out there and the cops would come to me and have meetings and stuff. But that never happened, we never got that far. Because I was approached by a State Security man, I think he was a gypsy, he was very swarthy, shorter, and he lived in Kladno and had a family. And he always called me to work and wanted to come to work to me. I said: ‘No, not to work!’ So, we'd, I'd change at Mírák from the tram to the bus. And when I said, he was always waiting there and talking to me. And he wanted me to sign the cooperation. And he said, that's not denouncing. He had this theory, they, the State Security men, had this theory, that I would get in touch with people where they wouldn't get in, which is true. And that he didn't want me to turn them in, but to say what the people were thinking. I said: ‘Well, ask them, why would I do it.’"

“There was a request from the company, during the Germans' time actually, to my dad if he could help, that a former employee of the company used to be there when the Germans took over Belgium. So, he was there, his name was Max Perés, and he was put in Mauthausen. Well, they wanted to see if dad could help them to get to Max in that Mauthausen, like food. So, I did, my mother did, but it was difficult, there was a rationing system, right, and everybody had a little bit of rice for a month, or rather a little bit of flour, a little bit of sugar, and that was enough. And my mother made a sort of a shoebox and put some of the food in there. And I carried it, the address was Mauthausen, and I carried it to the main post office. And that was guarded by Germans, German soldiers used to walk there, but I was a little boy, so they didn't pay much attention to me. I carried a box for this Max Perés, and normally I handed it to the post office. Well, it worked. Well, and then it actually came back to my dad after the revolution that he was like active like that and that he took care of these people.”

“Well, they rehabilitated my father, which means they gave my mother back some of the stuff that was confiscated after that. And one more thing, my father did that actually long before the war. When that cabin in Davle was being built, he was never actually the owner, but I was, although I was a little kid, the cottage was written in my name that. My father wrote it. That means, my father was my guardian until I was of age. Well, then in the sixties, when I was empowered, full age, I became part owner of that cabin. And that was the thing, because the cabin was confiscated, some guy from the National Security Corps moved in. And my mother went for it in such a way that he was kicked out of that cabin because it was mine and I wasn't being punished. So, I kind of got it back. They damaged that cabin partly because it was solidly built of pine boards inside and out, the walls, and they were looking for treasures, so they broke those boards out occasionally. And they expected there to be some treasure, but there wasn't any treasure. Then there was a carport in the garden, and the ground was hard clay. And they thought there might be some treasure there, so they dug up the wall, the attic by the garage, but there was nothing there either. So, they left it, right, and I got the cabin back, actually.”