Aloisie Pauerová

“On the first of May 1948, Mum's brother-in-law Josef Kohout emigrated - he had owned a small estate, 49 hectares, in Úsilov in the Domažlice region. He crossed the borders into Germany. When the people were joining the parade, my uncle crossed over. And so they came to us, at noon on the 10th of October. Dad had the best-furnished drug store and his own house. While he was tending to the garden, they came and confiscated everything. Someone ran to fetch Dad from the garden, I was two years old. Dad couldn't get into the store, where he had all his documents and so on. They sealed everything off like the debt enforcers do nowadays. Evening came, Dad packed his things, made his farewells - my sister was seven years older, she said she was in the act of tying my shoelaces when Dad said goodbye and declared he was going to his birth place. And he left to Germany.”

“In 1949, a day before Christmas Eve, they locked up Mum's sister Milada Kohoutová - she spent ten and a half years behind bars. She had two boys, Karel (...) was five and Pepa nine. They were left there, so they took them to Granddad and Grandma, who where born in 1882, so quite old. Auntie had two trials, she ended up with 18,5 years, she did 10,5 of them and paid a fine of thirty thousand, lost all her property. And my Mum started to serve her prison sentence a day after the execution of [Milada] Horáková.”