Marie Tesařová

“It’s sad. The comrades here received guns, they were waiting for the Russians to come from Skuhrov, but that wasn't happening. They were comrades mostly, a certain Meixner, for example, I recognised him. The received guns, they were drunk, and suddenly they remembered that we have a German here. But grandma was Czech, she had struggled against the German nation. I was sleeping on the ottoman in one room with grandma and granddad, it was in the night, and suddenly a loud banging - shots rang out first. So I wondered to myself what was going on, because we were the last building in the village, and suddenly there came a terrible bashing on the glass - we had bars and glass in the door. It was this drunken comrade saying he was here to shoot our grandma. Uncle Tony and I both knew him, and he was aiming at her - as a child I was horribly afraid that he might shoot grandma - I loved her dearly. What saved her was that Uncle Tony, my mum's brother, lifted the man's gun and took it from him. That was a terrible day for me - when you see someone aiming at a person you love.”

[Mafdo = man for disposal, an approximation of the Czech slang term “mukl” describing prisoners undesirable to the state - transl.] “When they arrived there, to Leopoldov, the camp commander told them: ‘You are mafdoes now, men for disposal, you came here, but you’re not going back.’ He said that if they killed them, no one would be punished, something like what they did to the Germans here, there was no judge, no prosecution. There he met up with priests and other spiritual elites. And he later told me: ‘They calmed me down so much spiritually, because after all that you feel the revenge boiling in you, after the injustices you’ve suffered.’ And he didn’t even know if his family was alive at all, because they kept him uncertain right until they visited him there, because his aunt kept trying to find out how to reach him. And after spending two years in Jáchymov, when they moved him to Leopoldov, they allowed him to receive visitors. Auntie told of how they arrived there all exhausted and dirty from the muddy path they had to take to get there, and then they were only allowed to talk with him for fifteen minutes under the supervision of a warder, who kept on interrupting them, enough of that and so on. And she told him that we were all in good health and that I had married, because he hadn’t been to my wedding, and [she] told him only about family matters, but in such a way that they could not find out who she was talking about, because I had a different name.”

“Uncle was in Leopoldov in one cell with Husák for six weeks, it should even be possible to verify that. Husák was retrospectively declared a deviation and a traitor. Husák was awfully silent and convinced that it was an injustice. Apparently, they sometimes put a murderer together with a political prisoner, so that he would tell on him - Husák might have been afraid of that. Well, and my uncle was an honourable man, and so the week that Husák didn’t speak to him, he tended to him. And he said they always had to call out their number, as if no names existed, when four chaps would carry him back to his cell in a military blanket after the interrogation - Husák unconscious, bleeding - they took him all the way from the interrogation room to his cell, and there they threw him in. And after [my uncle] had tended to him and given him drink for a week, Husák began to talk and said: ‘It's wrong, what they did to me.’ And Uncle said that it was the same as what they were doing to them also. That’s why no political process was signed under Husák, it was milder.”