Josef Sokol

“Well I was done with them in about a minute or two because I told them that I wouldn’t be in an organization that murders innocent people and on top of that I said: ‘I’m a believer and your colleague, who had studied in Russia, had told me: Josef, do you even know that as a believer you are an enemy of the working class? I told him: Well comrade Zavřel, I really did not know that, I’m only learning that now from you.’”

“My mother used to tell me how she had walked barefoot. The whole winter she’d be barefoot and only when they went to church, only then – by the gate heading to the road – her stepmother told her: ‘Fana, put your shoes on.’ So she put her shoes on and it was a beautiful feeling, how warm they were. And then, when walking out of church and as they passed the gate to the garden: ‘Fana, take your shoes off.’ So she took her shoes off and walked barefoot again. And she hated it the entire winter but in an interesting way. When I asked why it had bothered her and how, she said: ‘Well because the other kids that had shoes could slide beautifully and I couldn’t.’”

“I had one major advantage that both my mother and my father, not that they had studied fancy schools, my dad studied at a secondary technical school when I had already been born or when I was small. But my mom had no education apart from primary school. But she had lived with her aunt in Vienna for three years and had seen and learned a lot there. So, they both had the right opinions and I lived with them. And we discussed it. And when my uncles came to see dad, well, I listened.”

“Well and we really lived like Scouts there. That was awesome. The meadow, all the way to the stream, served us for archery and I don’t know what else we did there. Mainly sports though, that’s for sure. And we completed different tasks, it was good for that. Well I just remember that it was really hard for us when they woke us up in the middle of the night, they did it a couple of times. They raised an alarm. That our pantry had been robbed by thieves and then we had to look for them. Flashlights, yes, in the middle of the night. So one group went one way, second group another way…”

“Civic Forum organized and secured these meetings, discussions with citizens. Because people from the countryside and from cities here in the district, would come to us and ask for someone from the Civic Forum to come because people didn’t really know what was going on and wanted someone to explain it to them. So then Pavliščík, our boss, assigned me to go with one other man. Well and that was really interesting for me because it was in these halls for two or three hundred people, you know, in the bigger cities like Klobouky or Slavičín.”