Eva Langrová

“Dad was in Jáchymov until 1956. Mining activity was being reduced there, and he was thus later moved to Příbram. While he was in Jáchymov, we received a permission to visit him, and it stated who was allowed to come to visit, on what date and at what time. We would travel by train, usually overnight, so that we would arrive to Ostrov nad Ohří in the morning. There is a parking lot next to the train station, and buses were parked there. They were marked with a sign ‘group tour,’ but they were for those who arrived to visit the prisoners. They told us to get on the bus and they took us to the building where the visits were held. In Jáchymov it was the worst. While in Olomouc, dad would sit behind a wire screen when we came to visit him with mom. But when he was in Jáchymov he was behind a glass window, and we thus could not even touch, and we could not hear each other properly, either. There was a warden on each side, one next to dad and one next to us. They were watching what we said and what we did. To be honest, I was not even able to recognize where these visits were held: dad was in the Rovnost camp, but there were several camps. And the barracks are no longer there, only one remained. I remember Příbram better. It was a bit farther away from Příbram, and there was a huge meadow and a camp which was intended exclusively for visitors. Those who arrived to visit were brought in there from the train station by bus. They told us to get off there and they left us there outside. There was no place to sit down, no place to buy food, nothing. Some people would arrive all the way from Košice, for example, and then they had to stand outside on the meadow and wait to be called to go inside the camp. The camp was surrounded by a fence, and the prisoners were being taken in there like wild beats in a circus when they are led into an arena. There was a corridor made from wire fence and the wardens would bring ten prisoners at once into the barrack, for instance. Then they would start calling out names of relatives who arrived to visit. Inside the barrack there was a long table, and the prisoners sat on one side and the visitors on the other. It left me with unpleasant memories, it was really nothing pleasant. When I later worked in a shop, I went to sell some drugstore products to prisoners from prisons in Heřmanice and Karviná about two times. When the prison door banged shut behind me it was a very disagreeable experience for me. I can tell you that this does affect a person. Sometime just a little impulse evokes negative things in you.”

“What I remember most from the time after daddy’s arrest were the house searches. Usually there was a car standing in the street. We were under surveillance, and they monitored whom we met and talked to. When we turned off the lights in the evening, they would ring the bell and do a house search. They threw out books from the bookcase, they removed pictures from the walls to check if there were not any pamphlets behind them, they pulled curtains from the windows to check if we did not hide anything in them. After the Velvet Revolution, I made an effort to go to the archive in Pardubice and I paid a lot of money for copying the entire investigation file of my dad. I actually had to laugh, because unlike my parents who knew the Czech language well, those who wrote some of the documents s did not even know the correct Czech grammar. My mom became sick. It was a great strain on her mental health. She was under surveillance when she went to work. When she went to dad’s brother’s place, she even exchanged clothes with a woman who lived in our house, but it did not help. Eventually she became sick. At first she had problems with her gall bladder and fits of pain. Then she got flu, which developed into pneumonia. A doctor examined her. In order to be regarded favourably by the communists, some doctors would declare that she was only pretending illness. She did not have a possibility to get treatment. Eventually her health deteriorated so much that they had to take her to a hospital in Jeseník. They did not know what to do with her there and so they sent her to Olomouc to the university hospital. At first she was happy. She wrote to dad and she was glad that they would be close to each other, because dad was in the pre-trial detention prison in Olomouc at that time. Since they were both there, she believed that they were closer to each other. Children were not allowed to hospitals at that time. She underwent a gall bladder surgery. I went there with my grandma who lived in Ludgeřovice. I had to wait in the gatehouse, but mom begged the head nurse to allow her to see me. She walked out and that was the last time that we met. She told grandma that we should not come there, because it was a long and difficult journey, and that the doctor promised her she would go home within a couple of days anyway. Then they called us from the hospital that she died. Grandma wanted to know the exact cause of death, but the doctors did not explain it to her. They only told her that she was healthy, but that it was a misfortune that she died. That was what they said about it in the hospital.”