Jaroslav Václavek

“I was asking those soldiers: ‘A čto chotitě?’ And they pointed to my sister and my mother. ‘You!’ You know, when you are there to defend honour of your mother and sister, you don´t hesitate to make a pounce on somebody with your bare hands. However, that could have ended up really poorly. Luckily, I got a life-saving idea. When I was hiding during those months at home, I also used to sit in the loft. There we had some old, discarded newspaper. Imagine, I discovered there such a volume from before 1938, where was a picture of Stalin lighting his pipe. It was a very famous picture. Gottwald, the first communist president, also had pictures taken like Stalin and many others did too. It was more than ten, fifteen years in our loft, so it already turned yellow; nevertheless I cut that picture out. Since the soldiers used to come and burst into households, I cut out the picture of Stalin and put it in a frame where we used to have a family picture. And I placed the picture on the stairway front wall. I said: ‘Idi sjuda,’ to those soldiers, ‘I kto eto?’ and I replied: ‘Eto Stalin.’ And they immediately came to senses, we could say. Immediately. For them this was such a terrific authoritative figure. They probably realized they were in a house of some chief or so. They saluted and got out.”

“This was already after the war. I still went to school back then. Few boys got quite hard slaps on the street. They were wearing a cross with a red drop on the coat´s collar. Some communist or an officer stopped them there and spanked them for wearing such things. So yet here the situation was quite slanted.”

“I said: ‘Eto Žukov,’ and so on. They reached for their guns. They couldn´t imagine that a civilian could have a map, and yet, such an accurate map with all the villages and everything. For example, when they were captured, they would have faced a death penalty if they revealed a unit they belonged to, or the name of their commander, or such. And suddenly, I was telling them these information, which they probably haven´t heard before. They would have shot us like some espionage Nazi nest. Fortunately, there was one teacher from Siberia among us, their officer, who was a very intelligent man. He understood the whole situation, sent the soldiers out and they left. Then he told me to destroy the map.”

“Well, we had heard that for several times that they were going to liquidate us. Or that they shall have paved the streets with our skulls.”

“Let´s talk about the fall of 1950. I joined up and came to Komárno. That fortress doesn´t make a nice impression; it was built against the Turks. Well, I came to one of those rooms. The rooms were quite big with arched ceilings. The men, who were there asked me, where I was imprisoned before. I said I hadn´t been in any prison. But majority of them came from other prisons or from Jáchymov camps and so. I told them I was normally working at the Eastern Slovak Machine Works. However, they still wanted me to plead guilty. So yet, during the first 48 hours I realized it was not going to be good; that I happened to be at some penal institution.”