Ladislav Sukop

“There was an agent active in the area, and he instigated one of our neighbours to set fire to a stack of straw, which was punished very harshly back then. That stack of straw landed him with twenty years.”

“During football an ambulance drove up, and I was asked to go with the men for a check-up in Uherské Hradiště, and when I got inside the ambulance, I realised they were taking me to prison. And that’s how it was, and when we got there they tried to persuade me to give up the whereabouts of Hochman.”

“When we did holiday jobs, I repaired lots of crosses, so that was our political activity. They didn’t punish us for that any more, they just suffered that in silence.”

“There were four of us in Hradiště, and there was also one Communist officer there, who confiscated people’s things, and he had mental problems.”

“I graduated in fifty-two, and that’s as far as I got because I was arrested at that time, I had already been living illegally for almost five years, I had distributed pastoral letters, hid the fugitive Jan Hochman, and I also took him from hideout to hideout, before they locked me up, and him about half a year later.”

“We are sending our assessment of Ladislav Sukop, both he and his family have a dated style of living, in the manner of the clerical party, but otherwise he has a quiet and calm nature, and he enjoys playing theatre.”

“The period following 1948 was full of leaflets, young people distributed them, but I served at the altar at church and the priest asked me if I would distribute pastoral letters. I didn’t really understand things much at the time, but I agreed, and so it became known of me and I was assigned certain parish houses.”