Eva Laryšová

"What was their pretext? That we had been getting manure, everyone was getting manure. We had a bit of our own field where we grew potatoes. So they said, we had manure for our field, we stole the potatoes from the state farm, we couldn't have grown that many potatoes there."

"Dad kept going to all meetings, he was trying to persuade people saying: 'Ask the legionnaires who were to Russia how it looked there. And that's what you would want here?' But they were convinced that it has to be better than it really was. So he failed."

“They arrived in the morning with a truck. It was still dark. They told us what we were able to take with us, and they loaded it onto the truck. We were sitting on the truck with Zdenka and granny [mother] wanted to take some firewood above anything else, so that we would have something to keep us warm. Because of this she did not even take care about the furniture and the other things, and all this has remained there. We then always used to say that we would need this or that, but that it had been left at home. Never mind, we would bring it later. Afterwards. But it never happened.”

“They imprisoned him because we did not farm. My father went to work for the railway company to do various finishing works on the new railroad from Havlíčkův Brod to Brno. They came for him, they blindfolded him and they told him that they wanted to speak with him. They did a large house search in our home. They were looking for weapons. They came to us with their own hand grenade and they claimed that they had found it in our house and demanded that we tell them where we kept other weapons. My younger sister was still sleeping. She had her duvet pulled over her head and only her feet were protruding from under it. They threw the duvet away. I don’t know who they thought she was. They were searching our house for the whole day. We were not even allowed to go to the toilet. There was one woman and she always accompanied us when we needed to go. They tore out parquets from the floor and they threw out everything from the closets. People then told us that our house had been surrounded for the whole night.”

“I attended the grammar school together with my sister Zdena, but she later had to return home due to the law on one-classroom schools and since I was older than her, I remained there and I graduated. Our teacher for the civic education class was Silvestr Dvořák and there were only three of us girls in the class. One girl sat in the first row and the two of us sat behind her. One day the chair next to Heda was empty. Dvořák, whom we nicknamed stutterer, sat down on the desk and put his feet on the seat of the chair and he pointed to me: ‘Dobrovolná, so where did your father campaign against the agricultural cooperative this time?’ That was his start of the civic education class.”