Marcel Winter

“The interrogation went like this: at Public Security, at the criminal police, there was this former supermarket director, sitting casually on the table, almost lying on it. He was on friendly terms with them indeed. And he was trying to interrogate me, and I kept telling him: 'Listen, I didn't steal, not even a few pennies, nothing. And if I did, just sentence me and get over with it.' But every checkout counter had those slips with codes and numbers. And it had to match. And you would hand over those slips, they would take it with them. So, they let me go. But after maybe 14 days, they came again and took me for another interrogation, they took me to the prosecutor in Hradec Králové so he could put me in custody which he did do. And I can still recall those men from the criminal police, telling me during the interrogation: 'Confess or we will make your wife a whore and those three kids of yours will end up in an orphanage.' So, I won't hide that tears were running from my eyes as I imagined this really happening.”

“The year was 1971, as they started to persecute right-wingers. There were those two militia men who came to my office with sub-machine guns. And they led me all the way across the ZVÚ to the gate. And people, that's something I wouldn't forget, there were windows wide open, they were waving me goodbye, so maybe some of those officials knew, but they acted like human beings, at least some of them. So, they took me into this Civil Defence Shelter, which was under this little square, behind a gate, I had never been there before. They brought a chair for me to sit on, I can still see it, it was in the centre of the room, and they would walk around, and the first question they gave me was: 'Where did your father hide all the gold?' As my father was a private dentist, he died in 1969, just two days before Christmas, so they were quite inquisitive. And in the end, a militia man and a gatekeeper took me out of the factory, stating that I was a right-wing opportunist and an undesirable character.”

“In the course of the totalitarian era, I had to change jobs fifteen times and to move three times with my family. Later, there was even this ban, that no one could employ me in a sixty-kilometre radius around Hradec Králové. I didn't know why they were so afraid of me. Maybe the reason was that I was involved in arts and culture. Only after the revolution I saw this second reference of mine, I didn't know there were two of them, so I found out that there was a note: 'Father stood in the way of building socialism.' And as I was concerned, 'He has influence over young people so we should keep an eye on him.' And I could be maybe forty years old, and this note was still there.”