Prof. RNDr., CSc. Jan Peřina

“At that time professor Keprt and a professor Havelka clearly stated, as they already had party instructions: ‚We shall support your scientific growth, you will make a candidature, but you cannot habilitate, neither can you teach.‘ They told me that straight away. When it got to the party level, they the head of the party organisation met me. He was a PE teacher and then they locked him up, as he used to charge students fees at summer dam courses and then he defrauded it. So they locked him up even as a party member. And back then he was the chairman of the party organization and said: ‚Listen, you are a good student, we shall give you a party application.‘ Jesus, it was like being stabbed with a needle. Well I didn’t say anything, and probably blushed, but didn’t argument anything. He met me again the next day: ‚Well it is over now. So someone informed him already. And I was so worried as I was scared to refuse. That was a big deal indeed. And how would I cope? Luckily fate took a different course. Someone said that I was a son of a gulag and he gave me a break.”

“When they sentenced my father, it was tough on me and in January they called me into the training centre. We lived about five hundred metres in Novovysočanská boarding school. When you take a fast train to Prague and you come to Libeň, just a little bit on the left there is a cube building, a former boarding school. We used to walk cueing down to Harfa training centre. So they called me into the boarding school, there were two handsome men in leather coats and they informed me that it was decided I should cease my studies there and go to my mother in Arnoltice near Rýmařov, where they displaced her on December 23rd, 1952, when I was still in the boarding school. They came with a leader, Mr. Tatíček and others from the regional headquarters with a loading van and put her and my brother on and let them get off in Arnoltice at the end of a village in a house, which could even not be locked. With all they could bring in a van. I came back home from the boarding school for Christmas and didn’t even see them. So the comrades came to see me and said I should move in with her. That I should work there with her to keep the family together. And there we ought to work, my brother went to school and I was meant to work at the state farming estate.”