Eva Štěpánková

"Mom said that our dad was arrested, innocent, and that it would be explained and that he would return. So, we proudly walked and claimed, we were saying we have a dad innocently imprisoned in jail… We knew it… We believed in his innocence. Which was probably very important for our feeling from it all… My mom had a clear idea of what it was all about. Dad wrote letters, and in those letters when they let him write, and they didn't cross it out with black ink, I got them somewhere at home, if you're interested,… and in those letters he wrote to my mom, as if in ciphers or other allegories, that the people who kept him there were fascists. So, it was very clear to my mother. And besides, she had news from Hungary, where, of course, the same thing was happening, there was a trial with Rajek, it was exactly the same thing. So, she knew. Did it influence mom's convictions anyhow? They were convinced that it was within the people that other people came to power there, and for example in '68 they were both enthusiastic fighters for socialism with a human face. Dad was not recovered until 1971, when he was fired for the second time. And he left the Communist Party district committee and said, "I'm floating, I'm flying, I don't have a red book." Only then did he realize it. … He still believed, he still believed the whole time he was in jail. All the time while he was imprisoned, when he could, he shouted that he was a communist and that they were wrong and that he would explain it to them. He was convinced, that by someone that some people who were not real communists had got there. "

"My mother, such a humorous story, my mother was a fashion designer and she was making costume designs for some theaters and cabarets, and her friend and she invented things like that, to celebrate the liberation by the Soviet army, that the girls in a cabaret wore only sickles, hammers and five-pointed stars. Which was funny, but the Soviets were a little picky about it, so they arrested the nice designer. And my mom was so energetic, so she went to scream at the Russians, to let her go immediately, she meant well, and there she met Dad, who told her to be quiet, he arranged that they let the friend go, that's how they met. At the end of the war, when Budapest was liberated. My mother then joined them, she was given a uniform and was also in the Soviet army, then they went to Bratislava, liberated Bratislava and Vienna. And then they returned to Prague, because Dad found out that he has several of his siblings who survived the war in Prague."