Ludvík Jersák

"They were of the Reformation faith, they did not erect crosses on graves, nor did they crucify themselves. They prayed at night before they went to bed. - 'Were you taught to pray?' - Yes, my mother taught me. But I don't remember everything. In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit... I have a bad memory. - 'Did she teach you Czech?' - Yes. Everyone spoke Czech at home. Just like in every one of those 16 Czech houses. Then only twelve. Some left because in 1934 there was a military area and they had to leave the houses and the land they were living on. They settled nearby, some went back to Ukraine, but some stayed - the Čáps, the Jersáks. And in 1930, when the collective farm was being founded, there was tremendous pressure for people to join the collective farm. Those who didn't agree were sent to Siberia. They took horses, we had three or four horses, cows, sheep, everything to the collective farm, without any compensation."

"His left arm was paralyzed. It was the result of an eleven-month imprisonment. In those days, the KGB took innocent people straight from the field. They put them in prison in Syzran, interrogated them and forced them to sign that they were enemies of the state. He didn't sign. And then when Yezhov ended up as head of the NKVD, the prisons were overcrowded with people, so they asked my father what he was there for. He answered that he didn't know, that he hadn't signed anything. They tortured them, and then they took them to a table and held their hand to make them sign, some of them just wrote crosses, they were illiterate. - 'And the father was tortured in the interrogations?' - Of course, they were tortured. They put them up against a wall and made them stand for 24 hours, the security sat and took turns and they kept standing until they lost consciousness. Then they took them somewhere. There were a lot of them in the cells, and Ivan Čap's father was sitting with my father. It was very cruel. Some of them couldn't make it."