Pavlína Pešková

”But how it was disclosed: it was disclosed because back then, there were probably four boys, or we can say four young men actually, who were involved in the leaflet operation, and they all happened to be the same age and doing military service. And one of them got a leave and overstayed it, so he had some trouble. He was told that if he had had some information on someone, the expected punishment would have been mitigated. So he recalled the leaflets, reported them and actually turned himself in, too. He was also punished then and I would say his sentence was even longer than my husband’s. Had it not been for him, it would have never been disclosed. At first, it was thought that they were a bigger group, then it kind of unraveled until his and everybody else’s case ended up in the district court. There the sentences were more lenient, or lenient, I would say.”

“My husband got conscripted in fall, in October. I heard from him at the beginning of the military service and then I did not hear anything. So I set out to Litoměřice where he was posted. There I was told that he was at a military training because he had not been answering any of my letters. So I went back home reassured and telling myself: ‘If he’s at the training, he’ll be back for Christmas or New Year.’ Once, while thinking this way, the second wife of my father (because my father got re-married in 1946, I had been his housekeeper for about two years before and it probably was quite challenging for me at that time when food was rationed and we only got a cup of milk per day, difficult time it was, well… my daddy was posted somewhere else, he was escorting prisoners to work in various factories sometimes then), and I was alone at home with her and I said: ‘When he’s back for Christmas...’ And she replied: ‘He isn’t.’ So I asked: ‘Why?’ And she told me: ‘Because he’s over there’...And like this she pointed through the window as if toward the prison. This way I found out that my husband was in prison facing a 14-year sentence. He was found there by a relative who worked there and told so to my father’s second wife. So I found out that though I was expecting a baby, my husband was locked up for fourteen years.”