David Piálek

"I remember it was the same thing with his release after serving his sentence, where we basically did a later Christmas: that we would wait for my grandfather to come home and do Christmas Eve. He was being released from Valdice. And now we had telegraphed about when he was likely to arrive, which train he should take to Prague and from there to Marianske Lazne. We went to meet him, because after fourteen years he would hardly find the address. And then we met him at the station. And he didn't come. We went to the next train, and he didn't come again. We took about six of these trains day and night, when we used to go from Třebízský Street to the station in Mariánky, which is across the city. When my grandfather finally arrived the next morning, he explained to us that the train from Jičín had come for him at about ten o'clock in the morning. He asked to leave the prison at nine o'clock in the morning so that he could catch the train. And they told him that he started his sentence at one o'clock after lunch, so they would let him go at one o'clock after lunch. They didn't let him out until 1:00. And of course he missed everything, so he had to take a different train somehow and he didn't arrive until a day later."

"I can tell you one of my first personal experiences with the communist persecution. I remember, I could have been about four years old, because neither I nor my brother, who was two years older than me, had gone to school yet, so I was four years old or younger when we were searched. My recollection of it is that my mother and I were sitting on the couch in the living room and everything was being run in front of us - out of the closets, on the floor, of course. And now right in front of us was this dresser and on top of it was a glass display case. And there was a man who had a leather coat, high boots, a hat on his head. He opened the bottom dresser, and there was laundry in there, and he threw it all out on the floor and then he was stepping all over it. And on top of it was a glass case, and we had Otto's dictionary. The man wanted to take out all the parts of the dictionary. There was peephole glass. And he didn't know how to get in. He tried to open the door with his fingers, and he couldn't. He looked back over his shoulder at us, and then he elbowed the glass until it all spilled out on the floor. Then he took out these Otto dictionaries, leafed through them and threw them on the floor. It didn't so much as flash in my mind that we had to clean up for a week afterwards and so on. But that he was a man who couldn't open a trap door. How is that possible? It's been in the back of my mind for years and I didn't understand it. How can such a thing be, how can it be?"