Petr Werner Noack

"So my wife and I agreed that I would go to Germany, I would earn money there, I would get my salary in bons (coupons) and crowns, so it would be good and so on. So after that occupation, I went there. My wife and I agreed that if it worked, she would come to visit and stay there. Her mother didn't know it, no one knew it, her aunt just knew it. We told her. Not even her sister, despite the fact that we told her to check in at our apartment in Soukenická. My wife and I were still sending letters to each other. Nobody had a phone at home then. I wrote her neutral letters. I sent money, I got two hundred from my salary and I had to pay for my stay and the other money went to Inter hotels and my wife didn't get the money until two months later. She could withdraw part in the bank and part in bons. That would have been good. But when she ran away, she only got money for about a month. But before that I learned that she could not come to see me. So I told the boss in Frankfurt that I had to go back."

"Well, once my mom and I went to see my dad again. As he was in Bory, they sent them to labor camps, those Germans, that was clear. And he worked for some time in the cement plant in Dvůr Králové. We went to see him once when they permitted it to my mom. My mother baked for him and prepared a bag full of food and - what I didn't know then - baked her message into it. I was carrying a bottle of fruit juice to give it to him. And how excited I was when they called our number - we went and we weren't allowed to talk to anyone - so we went there to see him. And I dropped the bottle in the hallway. My mom had to wipe the hallway several times, and when she was done, the visits ended and they did not let us see dad. Dad was said that mom hadn't come to see him because she had found someone else. They kicked us out and cursed my mother into German whores and me into brats. I started crying when everyone there started yelling like that. - And how old were you? "I was eight."

"There were officials and a tribune, and one of them says, 'We, the communists, are salt in the eyes of the reactionaries and the elements...' and at that moment something fell into my mother's eye and the people around her started laughing. Suddenly they took her and took her to Pilsen to the StB. Mom didn't come home for two or three days. There they beat her, threatening to take me away for real this time. They pulled out her eyebrow that it had never grown on that side again. But I didn't know it then. I thought she stayed somewhere in Stoda, in that sandwich factory, and that she banged her head over something there. She didn't tell me all that until I was after the military service. She just didn't want to burden me with it."

"She went to the InterContinental to introduce herself if she would be taken to work in the hotel because my grandfather used to have a hotel - it was in the family. The director Kouřík took her to the office and she worked there after half a year as a operation manager. She told him that her husband was still arrested in Bory in the prison. He told her that her son was not the one to blame. He was fair, even though he experienced a concentration camp himself. And that's when the StB came after her, they wanted mom to work for them, and Mom refused. But they still went to her and were threatening her. They wanted her to sign it for them. They threatened to take me and put me somewhere for retraining. Which mom wouldn't sign it, so that nothing would happen to her child. She was worried not only about me but also about my grandfather, because my grandfather was de facto alone. My mother reluctantly signed it, but warned several people that the StB was following them. But one of those she warned peached her ... "

"First, my grandmother and I were locked up where my grandfather was. We were in some of the Benešov barracks. It was called the Prague barracks and I was two years old and there were guards who knew our family and they were quite fine. My grandma was on the first floor, my grandpa was downstairs, and I could crawl through the bars, and sometimes I was let go to Grandpa. My grandfather stayed there and I and my grandmother, de facto as a German, were then with my grandmother in a camp in Konopiště for German women and children. My grandmother and I were locked up there for ten months. Next to it was a camp where my mom was. If we saw each other, I don't remember. I just remember getting a whooping cough there. It was a pretty serious illness back then. A Russian doctor saved me."