Marcela Kýrová

“I applied for the permit to travel West. In those days, they gave you 12 German marks as pocket money. Once you applied for the permit, the secret coppers contacted you and wanted you to report to them afterwards, wanted to know what you had done and who you had met. Of course, they came to me, too. The party chairman Štěpán came to see me and said I had visitors. He led me to an office where there were two guys waiting. And they said I’ve applied for the permit, and it was up to them to approve it or turn it down. In those days I exchanged letters with one guy from West Germany and they wanted me to hang around him and find out what he was working on, directly in his office. And I said: ‘I’m not doing that, I’m not cut out for this kind of thing, and above all, he’s in Munich, and I’m going to Würzburg.’ – ‘We would send you down on a special purpose trip. We’d give you a little secret camera and you’d take pictures of his work.’ He was an engineer. They simply wanted me to take pictures of his drawing board, for example. And I said: ‘Not my type of thing, I’d mess it up, they would be able to tell I wasn’t playing fair. Absolutely no way.’ And they said: ‘Well, then we might not let you go.’ And I said: ‘So I’m going nowhere. Not travelling out, not coming back. I haven’t seen it so far and I won’t in the future, either. It’s not the end of the world.’ Eventually, they let me go anyway.”

“And my granddad was banished, fortunately he had relatives in Bezvěrov not far from Krašov, so that’s where he went. I don’t know how long he went for, but a good few years. He got banished so that he couldn’t corrupt people’s minds with his capitalist ideology and so on. They moved an older lady into our room that used to be his. She merely put her furniture in and came to visit once a month. She was being deeply apologetic. That’s how the communists did it. She was a decent human being. My mum would always serve coffee and cake and we would chat.”