Jana Sargánková

"Another experience of mine was what February 1948 was like, I recall it every time. I left school at the age of eight; I was in the second grade. And now I came home. Father sat in that dining room all collapsed, mother beside him. Dad was always the hero as it used to be. And I asked: 'What happened?' And my father cried. So I asked my grandmother what it was, I was so surprised. And my grandmother or my mother told me, because my father couldn't even talk to me, that in front of the windows of his office, that was Fryštát, nowadays Karviná, communists and workers were shouting: 'Hang Rett!'"

"When my father was locked up, no one came to see us in Ostrava. Hardly anyone, not even family. Because everyone was building a career and what if they came to us, he was an enemy of the state and so on. But a few acquaintances remained. However, dad was called by the State Security for questioning. He learned there too, we had to have an evesdropping device in the house, they were aware of whoever came to us, how long he had been there. And the best part was that they told him about our grandmother. Because when the radio was playing in our house, my grandmother used to say: You communist whores, you will be hanged and so on. So they told him to ask his mother-in-law to behave. Because if she talked like that, things would have ended badly for her. Well, grandma was over seventy, just like me now. Well, dad said he couldn't talk like that. Well, we knew and pondered with whom and from whom we have the device. Then we learned that a secret policeman lived above us in Poruba and that he somehow served it there.''