Ing. Rostislav Sochorec

“The first search was probably on Monday the following week. I arrived in Moravský Žižkov with a man who worked as an assistant at our farm. We found out that strangers were there, they were rummaging through our library, flipping through each book page by page and looking all over the house. They did not tell us what they found out only the fact that the house search had been ordered. It was strange for us. They might have given a document to my mum. It was horrible. We saw strangers coming into our house, rummaging there, and doing what they wanted without telling us our rights. It was a terror of the official power, which would ambush you and start treating your property as its own. At the same time, we still did not know what was happening to father."

“We were used to father going away without us being informed in advance whether the journey would last only until the evening or whether it would take a week. We were of course worried when we did not get a notice. In the week from the 23rd of February, we experienced the 25th of February and the following days when we suddenly got to know that President Beneš accepted the resignation of some ministers and appointed Gottwald to form a government, and that priest Plojhar got into the government for the People's Party. We were really tense at that time because we did not know what happened, where the father was, and why we did not have any notice from him. When he did not return to Prague two days later, (her) sisters called mum and the whole family started to find out intensively where our father had disappeared. I went to school and did not say anything to anyone. We suddenly felt that there was a danger that not only our father but also us, his relatives, were in and that anything could happen. It was drastic.”

“We finished in Banská Bystrica on November 29, 1954 and they told us that we could request to become civilians again. They gave us the money which we had earned. They had been giving us half of the money immediately in cash, and I had been sending this money to my mom, and the other half had been deposited as a blocked deposit. But the savings books were cleverly held by our commander, and when the currency reform was put into effect in 1953, they exchanged our savings not 1:5, but 1:50! My earnings for two and a quarter of years were thus 2 350 CZK. Of course, the economic situation was different back then, but I think that this was not much money, really. It is possible that somebody had made use of our earnings as we discovered later. When we worked we had to pay for our food, clothing, material for heating, light, and for being guarded by those communist soldiers who were watching us and getting paid for our working on top of that. No wonder that we received so little money after that time.”

“We experienced a great thing in Banská Bystrica on September 1, 1954. We were to be released and go home on that day because we have spent 24 months doing military service. There was a roll call and we waited to be released. Instead, they announced to us that we were being retained there for an extraordinary army exercise. We asked the commander for how long. ‘This is not stated in the orders, but it is quite obvious. Of course, you may raise a complaint, but the order says that you are to continue.’ We were boiling with rage and we thought that this was weird. Firstly, we have been already screened once, and we continued to do digging and constructing roads nevertheless, and we were to terminate our military service and they did not tell us why they had prolonged it for us. Fine, we shall ask the comrade minister then. We really did write a letter to the minister. I knew the workings of the communist bureaucracy: that it was necessary to find the person behind the idea, the person who had organized it and those who had written it and sent it. Therefore I said: ‘You will borrow a typewriter, you will get some papers, and you all will write one after another. You write ten words and then another person continues.’ They had to go and write one by one. The letter was composed by about fifteen people from our room. It was written in a polite way, and we turned to the minister and pointed out that we have become politically reliable and that the regular period of military duty was now over for us and we had already been through it all, but still we did not know for how long we would stay there. Obviously, it evolved into a scandal. The comrade minister did not even bother to reply. On the other hand, he sent the OBZ, the military interrogation police, there and they started interrogating us. But when they found out that each of us really wrote just a part of it, they realized that they were unable to blame it onto anyone and they ceased pursuing the case.”

“At that time, in autumn 1953, political screenings of people who held the classification E were being conducted all over the country. ‘E’ meant politically unreliable, and these people were assigned to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP). A great many people have passed, but since the main factor which was considered in the political screenings was your class origin, you could not change that by having done military service. I was thus one of those who have not passed and together with others who were in the same lot we were reassigned from Moravia to the PTP battalion in Komárno and we were told that we would continue there. When I studied the documents later, I found out that this Komárno battalion was supplemented by all people from Bohemia and Moravia who had not passed the screenings, and this way the battalion continued to exist. Of course, it was in winter between 1953 and 1954, which was one of the harshest winters. When we worked on construction sites and they brought us mortar in the mortar cart, it would freeze in our ladles before we could transfer it to the wall. They probably decided prudently that we would not have done a lot of work on the construction sites anyway, and instead they sent us to coal mines in Ostrava for three years. I thus got to the miners’ city Ostrava for the first time as a soldier.”