Vladimír Rams

“It was my father, who with help of his acquaintances in Prague managed to find the VONS representative. In secret from his friend, who had to be a communist party member in a high function, got a contact address to Petruška Šustrová. I still remember as clear as today that we arrived to Prague, as villagers it took us quite a long while to find it. Then we arrive to the flat, which was just on the ground floor. We knocked, we banged on the door, nothing happened for a long while and then an older lady, who kept chain-smoking, came to welcome us. She took us in and I explained everything to her, even showed he the documentation we kept. And she just looked out of the window and hummed: ,Hmmm.‘ And my dad asked: ,What are you still looking at?‘ – ,Well they´re after you now, that´s clear.‘ And ever since then we could not go back, as it was clear which side we took and where the other side was.“

“And then came November 1989 and gradually the social and political situation was changing in the Czech Republic, in the former Czechoslovakia. But we were far from trying to renew the process, to let the same people, who judged and sentenced us, to rehabilitate us again. Because the same policemen stayed there and only a few were thrown out, just to look good, and they got even better posts later. The judge was there the whole time, the prosecutor worked in the same post until he died... Political life changed and was played with the same puppets. Those, who worked there before revolution, kept working there joyfully even after that. So our own trust in any improvement of political climate was very low... We welcomed what was official, all that happened in Prague, but we knew exactly that in Karlsbad everything remains the old way. Policemen, prosecutors, judges, they went hand in hand as they did before.“