Karel Šling

“I do remember it. We went to bed as usual; State Security always made their arrests in the night, they learnt that from the Soviets. Because a person the most thoroughly disoriented when they nab him at two in the morning. He doesn’t know what’s going on. So I remember we went to bed, suddenly the light switched on, we got up, there were men in leather coats in the room. State Security copied that off the Gestapo, you could say, the long leather coats, it was a kind of uniform. We got dressed, they put us in a car and took us away. We were in the car with our mum because Dad wasn’t there at all at the time, he’d been nabbed on the way home, he hadn’t come home at all on that 6 October. On the way the comrades managed to get lost, and their car broke down. We finally arrived at the Ruzyně prison, where State Security officers forcibly tore us apart from Mum, loaded us into a second car, and took us away. I know that the separation was very dramatic, I screamed and held on to the car’s door handle. They had to wrench me away, and then my brother and I locked ourselves in the car, so they had to force their way in. We locked the car at one o’clock in the night, because we didn’t want to leave, so we locked ourselves in. We were lured out by Dad’s chauffeur, who baited us with a toy. So we unlocked the car, and then they got us.”

“The trial with Slánský began in November 1952. And that’s when all hell broke lose, so to say. Because the headmaster of the [children’s] home decided that my brother had to listen to the broadcast of the trial and to our father admitting to the crimes he had committed. He also had to write a homework about it. I was lucky because I was two years younger, I was too small for that, so I didn’t have to endure it. But it impacted us the same, everyone turned against us, claiming that my father was a traitor. The way things were back then, when you got labelled like that, everyone went against you. So you can imagine the situation. I can say that my brother had mental problems because of it until the end of his life. I did as well, I guess, although at the time no one knew what post-traumatic disorders were, that didn’t exist back then.”