Jana Soferová

* 1939

  • „We used to go to Croatia. There was a secret cop at our heels. After return, we had to report with whom we talked. Once there was this bit of trouble, we went to Zagreb. Those were business trips to a fair there but we would always go to the sea, the fair waas a bit of cover up. I remember the searches at the borders, because of cash, for exahmple. Once the guys played cards and before we got to the Slovak borders from Teplice, they had some cash put aside. The border control found out and they kept us there from 10 in the evening until six in the morning. They searched the guys, three of them were even strip searched. We had to take everything out. The men had crates of beer with them.”

  • „They jailed my dad because he actually did his job. A friend came to him and asked him to sell him some paper so that he could copy flyers. That was the reason why they jailed him. They arrested him on the 11th of August in 1949. Mum’s brother and his children were visiting. Jitka was one year junior, Leoš was two years younger. In the evening, I was lying in bed and I heard some rattle. In the morning, they told me that daddy had to leave in a hurry and that aunt is making fruit preserves and that I should go and help her. So I left with my uncle for Pardubice. They didn’t tell me that he was jailed. I only found out that my father had been imprisoned when I returned back home at the end of the holiday and was about to go to school. It was a terrible feeling. I was ashamed, I had this feeling as if my father had murdered someone. I did not know what he had done. They told me that he had done nothing bad. When I met a cop on the street, I was beside myself with dread. It was better at school because there were three of us whose fathers were in prison.”

  • born in October. We left for Bulgaria by train. We were renting a room, I remember that we lived in the countryside. I heard that they had to have the dogs killed so that it would be quiet there. The local people let us live in their place while their whole family was squeezed in one room. They were really nice. At that time, Russians came to Czechoslovakia, the occupation started. Bulgarians came alongwith thhe Russians. But they were nice to us. They let us listen to the radio, they tuned in the Radio Free Europe. They lend us a radio so that we would know what was going on. It was a horrible situation, we had our six-year-old son with us but the two-year-old daughter was back home with grandma. When we were supposed to go home, it was not possible. We were lucky that the East Germans were not supposed to stay in that place right after us. They wouldn’t let us home, there were no trains going. We had to wait for a week, we did not know what would happen. The local lady told me that we could stay, that I could work at the chicken farm with her. My son was supposed to go to the first grade and he started school a bit later. The journey back home was interesting. At that time, the trains didn’t go via Romania but through Yugoslavia. When we stopped there, there were people from the Red Cross waiting and they would give us milk, they even gave cigarettes to the men. They were weeping and worried what we were getting into. When we saw that, we were terribly scared.”

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    Louny, 15.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:30:16
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
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The Communists took away our shop, they jailed my father and I was scared ever since

Jana's photograph from the graduation board. 1959
Jana's photograph from the graduation board. 1959
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Jana Soferová, née Pospíchalová, was born in 1939 to a family of booksellers. Her grandfather and then her father had a bookstore on the main square in Louny. In 1949, the Communists misappropriated their shop and their house and her father was sentenced to 17 years of imprisonment for having sold paper for printing leaflets against the Communist régime. After having gone through the basic school and a two year accounting course, Jana was not allowed to study at an university. She thus started to work in the North-Bohemian Brickworks in Teplice. Shortly after, her father died. She worked as an accountant in the brick factory for all her life. In 1960, she married Ivan Sofer and they had two children, son Luděk and daughter Jana. During the August 1968 occupation by the Warsaw Pact armies, she was on holiday in Bulgaria and due to the situation, she needed to prolong her stay there. When her family got their house on the Louny main square back, Jana sold it, divided the money to her family and she and her husband travelled across the whole world. In 2022, Jana lived in Louny and was active at the University of the Third Age. We were able to record the story of the witness thanks to the support of the Louny town council.