Petr Závodský

"Uncle Odon found out sometime in July 1954, when he wrote... Mother only felt strange, that she always sent him a 50 crown bill and that it was always sent back to her. And he kept on asking and they in July 1954... Mother had still in April or May written an appeal for mercy, but nobody had told her anything. And he asked about it, how it'd be with that mercy, that at first when Odon wrote about it, and they only learned about that court sometime in February or January, the end of January or beginning of February 1954. They kept on asking, and then through some contacts... they said: 'The defense advocate didn't tell you?' And so Odon went to that advocate and he said: 'Yeah, he had a process and he got the death penalty.' Two months after that. Mother received the death certificate in December 1954. But she knew it from Odon verbally since July. They didn't cremate father, they put him in the Ďáblice graveyard, in that hole number 35, which we only found out in that year 1966. Only after his rehabilitation in the year 1966 mother asked for an exhumation, and so they did it. And then they said, that they'll place him in Strašnice. There wasn't free space there and so they then said, that in December a spot would be freed up. And so in December 1966, I have it photographed somewhere, there my mother is today, there they rest. He wrote two letters of farewell. One to my mother and one to his brothers, and they gave that to us in the year 1996. They gave it to us after 42 years."

"I cannot remember my earliest childhood, I can only remember things since sixty-five. For example my father, who was arrested in 1951, is completely unknown to me, I only saw him now, when they made public those films about Slánský, that were found. There I saw him alive for the first time, but only as a figurine, and all that he said there, those ridiculous things. I can remember a bit from first class, when miss teacher Dvořáková was taking care of me during my mother's hardest period, in the year 1954 - when father was executed and she didn't know it and still appealed for mercy - and so she took me under her care for about 14 days in the summer. We went to various dog exhibitions, which I didn't really enjoy, because I was more of the sports type. I was interested in football and dodgeball, the kinds of things." - "And so what interested you aside from sport?" - "Sport, only sport, and hiking. I went to a hiking troop, which gave my mother the option, that I went to camps with the hiking troop a lot. We crossed Slovakia on foot, until we got to Poland all the way to Warsaw, that interested me. Aside from that, at that age I played football and dodgeball every day, back then basically no other sport existed. Because we lived in a divided apartment on Opletalova 59, we went to the playground at Vrchlické sady, where the playground isn't there anymore today. Today there's only a small children's playground there. When I walk by I gawk at how the trees grew up, because in my era the trees which grew there were as wide as an arm and today I cannot even get my arms around them. I have these memories. And then I have memories about the cubistic kiosk on Bolzanova street, which is protected as cultural heritage. We used it as a goal box from the back. Those are some things I remember from childhood." - "Did you ever ask your mother where your father was? Or 'Where do I have my dad?'" - "I asked once or twice, but I mother always stayed silent, and so we basically didn't know anything until the year 1963. Because not even the teachers, who - today I see it the way that, they were nice, and so didn't make it apparent to us. Not even from my parents, not from my uncles in Ostrava, did I get to know it until sixty-three. Only as a little treat: when I was writing down things on my medical card in my childhood, I wrote in, that my father had died of cancer."