Kristina Čermáková

“The first meeting was of course a great joy but at the same time… I remember the feeling – what a strange feeling it was to be so adult and my father, whom I remembered as an amazing, strong person, was suddenly completely different. And he acted so… like he didn’t know how to act! And there were these terrible moments because we couldn’t speak loud – because if someone spoke out loud or if there was a loud noise he sprung to his feet and stood at attention. As he was used to doing, you know. He was afraid to go outside.”

“Just what I know about how they treated these people in jail – that they really had to walk barefoot all night, for example. When father was brought to the trial, they had already fixed him. Because they had started to feed them and take care of them before the trial. But my father had fallen arches exactly because they used to beat their legs terribly, everyone knew that. He also had several broken ribs and because of that he had severe breathing problems. He suffered from that until the rest of his life. When they took him away, he was fifty one. So you can imagine: a fifty-one-year-old person. He had black mane of hair. And he was energetic and brimmed with life. Then at the trial we almost couldn’t recognize him, although he was already relatively okay at that point.”

“And we had our youngest daughter about one year later, because when I came back to Prague from Vienna, I felt like I was empty-handed, although I had three boys there. It was one of the worst periods in my life. And my husband’s too because there was such terrible alienation among us, now that I think about it… When I thought about it later, I figured it had been almost a miracle that our marriage hadn’t failed. Because we were suddenly like two strangers, two hostile strangers. I don’t know if it was because we both blamed ourselves for the little girl’s death and we couldn’t get over it. But eventually we overcame it and the marriage has worked for fifty-seven years.”

“My brother was graduating from an academic gymnasium in 1951. And because things had already been changing, he came home from school one day and said: ‘They don’t want to let me take the final exams for political reasons.’ And the next day father got up and said he would go and fix it. So he left and one hour later three men in leather jackets rang our bell, asking for my father. And they said: ‘Well, if he’s not home, we’ll wait for him and we’ll do a house search in the meantime.’ We had a three-room apartment and one of them was… they were large rooms as it was a family house. One of the rooms was enclosed with books on three of the walls. They went searching through the books one after another the whole morning, searching for… God knows what. And dad called home three times that morning and we couldn’t tell him they were there. Coincidentally, I was home that day because I had been sick or something, so I didn’t go to school.”

“To get there on time, we had to leave Prague at around 11 p.m. We travelled all night. We got off in Mohelnice because the train continued further on. There we waited for about an hour in a room at the station, before the next train arrived. Then we went on and arrived in Mírov where we had to wait again, for a bus. The bus took us all the way to the jail, it was a special bus, and we arrived at around 6:30 a.m. and the jail opened at 7 or 8. So we stood outside and waited, after that terrible night. Later they at least opened a pub there where one could sit and have a cup of tea. Then we went on the visit, you had to stand like at a post office… like the counters at a post office, except there was a net so that you could hear, otherwise it was glazed and secured in all other different ways. The visit lasted twenty minutes. A warden or a Public Security agent stood next to my father. You couldn’t talk about anything but family matters. So when you started talking about school, for example, and the warden didn’t understand it, he could say: ‘That’s it, visit’s over.’ And even when it went well, we had to undergo all that just for twenty minutes of such a conversation. We did it gladly, of course. The number of people was always limited to only two.”