Eva Malá

“My uncle Radek was imprisoned in Rtyně in the area of the Giant Mountains, in Jáchymov and I do not know how many prisons he went through. We went to visit him as children with our grandmother and grandfather because children were not counted. I think that it must have been Rtyně because we walked through the forest. I know there were bunkers there and we got to the wooden barracks. When we got there and it was our turn, they took us to one of the wooden barracks. It was long and divided in the middle by planks and there were windows cut in the wood in certain parts and they led us to one of these windows. They brought Radek, a warden was on each side, Radek in the middle, and we were on the other side. We could at least see him, and my grandmother and grandfather could talk to him. We were so little that he could see only our heads.”

“In a few days, when I came from home, there was a man in a long coat standing at the front door when I opened it. When he saw a little girl, he let me be, he did not ask me anything. I went upstairs to the flat where my grandmother and grandfather lived. And as I was walking upstairs, I was looking around. There were pictures on the wall and there were tags on all of them. Then I entered their room and there were also tags everywhere, tags by the books. It seemed to me as if I were at a children's carnival and they were raffling off what you won. Those were like locker room tickets. They found out when they put down the fire in the factory – they found documents from Sokol there which my grandfather had hidden from the Germans. They were somewhere under the floor together with some material which he had also hidden from the Germans. However, times evolved in a different way, so it stayed there in the 1950s. They found out about it during the fire, and they imprisoned my grandfather as well. So, my grandmother had both her son and husband in prison.”

“It was a forced labour camp. And I was born at the time of my father´s imprisonment in the 1950s. That is why it was written in the column “father” in my birth certificate: at that time in the Mírov forced labour camp. And it meant a reputation for me for the years of my education and my youth because you need your birth certificate at school and for many other activities. So, everyone could read that my father was imprisoned, and nobody cared if he was someone who fought for our nation and put his life on the line for our nation every day. Everyone more likely thought that he had done something wrong or that he might have been a thief or something.”