Kateřina Dejmalová

"Among other things, Julius Tomin also began to hold seminars with Machovec. And Julius Tomin was a philosopher. I have the feeling... I don't know if he's still alive, I have the feeling that he died, and I'm not sure or I don't know [he was 83 years old at the time of recording]. He was a philosopher, and because he was very distinctive, he decided to write to Oxford about our situation. And also, Mrs. Barbara Day, who founded or ran the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and also sent teachers here, was a big influence on the organization of the housing seminars that were not run by us. Mr. Julius Tomin wrote to Oxford, describing the situation of the Czech youth or the Czech people, and asked if occasionally an Oxford professor or teacher could come to Prague to give a philosophical lecture. Which is, if you take it as from the point of view not only of that time, but at any time, it's an absolutely incredible act. Not only would I never have thought of it, but if I had thought of it, I would never have dared to do it. But he was very... how should I put it, he didn't actually see anything inappropriate about it and he was right. And strangely enough, the Oxford teachers responded to it and started coming here."

"I remember it very well, because I was at home when the police came in and did a huge search. I took it very badly at the time. I also, when they locked ours up, I disposed of all their letters with their consent, and I was left with the habit of not keeping any myself. Nowadays there are e-mails, but I didn't keep any, as long as there were some paper postcards, letters, I didn't keep any of it at all, nothing at all, because it was a crazy trauma for me that the police were there reading my parents' letters. Then, I read them too and then I disposed of them. And again, I'm going to digress now, I'm sorry. How my parents perceived the fifties. My father is in Bratislava and he writes a letter home saying some family things, and then he writes: 'If you could send me a goose again, I'm hungry here.' Well, he, an officer in a university, I don't know what kind of university, is hungry in his position and with his salary. So, it bothered me terribly at the time. And my dad was taken away and he didn't come back, and my mom was arrested while she was still sick, in bed, then they came for her."

“It was in the so-called hole. It was a room for two, perhaps three people, about as wide as my outstretched arms. I am or was a metre sixty-five [centimetres] tall, and it’s said that your outstretched arms are about the same as a person’s height. So it was a metre eighty-five, maybe two metres. The problem was that there wasn’t a toilet there, just a hole leading down, with a tap above it, which provided water. So something that wasn’t exactly [great]. Over the next four days I got the company of two girls, both street hookers, young, simple girls. But they took me for interrogation every day, so I [only] spent the nights with them. The interrogations were, well, most of the cops were really uneducated. They had their degrees, the police ‘judr’ [JUDr., Doctor of Law - trans.], but they were terribly uneducated. For instance, I took some pills - I had them for an acute stomach problem, I wasn’t completely healthy at the time, and they were awfully surprised that I needed them. I don’t know why they were surprised.”

“The whole trial [with my husband] was just for show, and he spent another two years in prison. So they released him in seventy-four. And it must be noted that he served his time in Minkovice, which was the second correctional category. But it was basically a much stricter prison than Mírov. Mírov wasn’t a simple prison. It was a Category Two, and it had a very bad reputation. But in Minkovice they made crystal [glass], like in a number of prisons. People who have glass chandeliers at home, produced from the fifties to 1989, should gaze at them with affection because that was the slave work of prisoners, mostly. Just like the polished fashion jewellery, beads, and so on. The work was really very hard, and the trouble was that they had a base ration of food that was insufficient for the hard work they were doing there. If you weren’t fast enough and didn’t fulfil your quota, you got a reduced ration. You had to catch up and keep up with your quota or surpass it for some time to get bigger rations.”

“I arrived on the twenty-fourth [of August], I remember it exactly because it was Dad’s birthday. I came to Prague, the train stopped in Smíchov because it couldn’t go to the main station because of the blockade. There was no transport at all, so I had to walk all the way from Smíchov to Letná. I can still remember walking along the Vltava, surrounded by tanks and armoured cars, and me walking amidst them. Staring wide-eyed at what had happened. When I came home, I found that my brother was lying heavily wounded [in the hospital] at Charles Square because he’d snatched up a camera and gone straight into the streets of Prague. At the medical centre in Italian Street, which suffered from gunfire, he tried to use his deeply limited knowledge of languages - he still can’t speak proper French, although he’s lived in the country since 1968 - to explain to the commander of the soldiers there, a relatively small unit, that it was a hospital. That it was a medical centre, that they shouldn’t be there, that they shouldn’t shoot at it, that they were taking wounded people there. And [the Russian] said he wouldn’t discuss the matter, so my brother, who was always a bit of a hotshot, yelled at him: ‘Tovarisch komandir [Comrade commander]!’ And when the tovarisch komandir turned round, he took a photo of him. And he started legging it with the camera, so he got a sub-machine-gun burst in the back. He was lucky, the bullets hit him in a way that he didn’t die. It mangled his shoulder, but he was lucky.”