Ing., Arch. Martin Rajniš

“Father did not sink into hopelessness. Bolsheviks tormented him in a really nasty way but he whistled to himself. He took a tram from the Praga company and he sang a song: Podle nosa poznáš kosa, podle ptáka Pragováka. (You can tell the blackbird by the nose, you can tell the Praga employee by the bird). He had a modest income but he tried to make life beautiful for us. He succeeded. I can´t say that I´m disgusted when I remember the 1950s. However, I once woke up and eavesdropped on my father carefully instructing mother what to do in case he is imprisoned. Where there is a little money abroad, how to cross borders with me and things like that. I pretended to be asleep. Thanks’ God, that did not happen.”

“My father once found out that I came to him and told him: ‘Dad, I have two dads.’ And he told me: ‘Wait, what is this rubbish?’ I told him that my second dad was called Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. And that he likes me very much, maybe more than he does. Father got scared. He sat me on his knee and it started. Gulags, millions of dead people, famine in Ukraine. Whereas Bolsheviks ignored it, my father knew it. My father never accepted anything more than social democracy and explained me what lies and deceits they were going to tell me at school. And then he told me: ‘And promise me now that you won´t tell anyone, that you won´t play by their rules. Play possum. Because if you ever repeated what I told you, we would get imprisoned and you would go to reformatory.‘“