Stanislav Wieser

"My mother sat and discussed with us as children whether it was good to join the party or not, because the party promised a good future. My father, of course, was very quick to dampen these considerations. There was no question of my mother joining the party. My father wore a Communist Party badge under his lapel. There were those who used to denounce it, that my father would go to meetings with the badge and to class with the badge under his lapel. That was the difference from what happened during the war, when they swore he didn't turn off Moravec. They were all in it together then, and unfortunately that hasn't happened again. My father had several proceedings that he didn't wear the badge. In the end, the pressures were not only from denunciations, but also from people like that who wanted to become a director. It seemed to them that they had been in the post-war era long enough to be a director. In the end, two years before my father retired - this was 1958, those conditions were still reverberating - he was removed as a director because he was not a Communist, although he was a very good trade unionist and had done a lot for the union. And he always said to me, 'Don't ever get involved in the party, you can work for the union, the union does something for the people.'

"There was no television at that time, there was no point in listening to the radio because the short wave had to be removed from it, it was impossible to listen to the broadcasts from London which encouraged the people in the Protectorate. It was even a criminal offence, so that just finding a receiver equipped with reception for Western radio was already grounds for arrest and being taken to a concentration camp. My father had one radio equipped with shortwave, and he kept it locked in a cupboard among his wardrobe. He used to hide in that closet when he listened to it. One incident stuck with me, which was quite frightening. I was playing in the kitchen with my mother, or rather my mother was cooking, and I was playing on the floor. Suddenly the doorbell rang and I was always curious who was coming, so I ran to my mother. Behind the door was a uniformed SS man, even wearing a helmet with SS insignia on it. Mum stood there like she was scalded, because at that time dad was just listening to the radio in the bedroom cupboard. It wasn't that loud, but you could hear something. Mum stood almost without speaking and the SS man could see that she was upset. He saluted, saluted and asked where Mr. Cerny, who was a well-known confederate, lived. He lived in our house. My mother didn't say a word and pointed down one floor. He saluted, left, and my parents waited for trouble to happen, and it didn't. Either he missed the issue, which was probably the main reason, because he saw me as a kid, he saw some family, you can't say he went in there like a warrior looking for where the radio was. It was towards the end of the war, I think it might have been the autumn of 1944. But by the time it was clear that the Red Army had crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, the SS didn't even go to Mr. Cerny's place."

Another intense memory from the war was that the businessmen with whom our family was associated, for example, my father was the headmaster of the business school there, so the children of those families also went to his school. And those businessmen some of them were Jewish families. So I was confronted with the fact that from my circle, we used to go to play in this forest party near Kostelec, there's a playground there, and there those friends who were from Jewish families, they would disappear. So at home I learned that they had been taken to some concentration camp, and of course this was never talked about publicly.

In the first republic, my parents posed as Czechs, but then they declared themselves German. We have a name, as you can see, German or German-sounding, even though it is originally Austrian. The Wiesers were originally meadow-keepers, meadow farmers, those who farmed meadows in Austria or even in those nearby countries, because it wasn't just Alpine countries. Of course, this name had a certain significance in the war, because as bearers of the name Wieser, we were not as bad off as others who had Czech names, but on top of that they were involved against the Germans in the borderlands. But on the other hand, my parents wanted to show, because my father didn't want to give up the name, so they wanted to show that we were a Slavic family, so I am Stanislav, which is a Polish name, the second one was Jaroslav, which is a Polish name, but mainly, I would say, Russian, Vladimir, that's completely, that was my third brother. And Milan, he was born after the war, there those two brothers who were born in wartime. And Milan got his name again, so actually from somewhere in the south, that's somewhere in Slovenia, Croatia.

I don't have the key document, I have it somewhere, but I haven't found it now, where the company wrote to every possible direction, especially where I published in a magazine, so they wrote a letter that I was an enemy of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union and that I couldn't publish. And they sent it to the army and I was demoted in the army on the basis of that. So I suddenly, I was already a lieutenant as in that promotion, we as college students were given the rank of sergeant, then we were second lieutenants and lieutenants. And all of a sudden I got my military book and it said private, and I was demoted on December 1, 1971. And what I had in there, all the entries, here in the book, they were gone, and I actually got a new book, but it had an old picture in it.