“Once I went to hand over the ratios of eggs and stuff like that to Nečín, and I said to myself, if there was a theatre there? And do you know what they did to that person? On the semitrailer, they put such a large barrel full of ice cold water. And all the stupid people came to look at it. Suddenly they all turned into predators. I cannot understand that until today... I felt that already at school. When they killed Honza Masaryk, I first knew it was a murder, and it was March 10, I will never forget it. And we have already argued amongst ourselves, who would be the communist, and who would not. Mr. Hájek was forced into the icy water by force. I said, "Why are you doing that?" And someone replied: ´He is dirty.´ And Mr. Hájek screamed, ´I may wear dirty clothing, because I'm still working hard, but you will never scrape off the dirt from your soul! I took him and told him: "Mr. Hájek, you look pretty bad. Come to our place. 'So he laid down on the bench, more dead than alive. We called the ambulance to take him to the hospital, and he never came back.”
“We were thirty living in those former deputy houses. Out of that twenty-one murderers, and only four convicted by a state court on each block; so that the murderers would re-educated us or what. They ought to serve as a pattern for us. They killed only one or so... They said to us: ´You wanted to exterminate whole nations. You are not human.´But I do not wish that to anyone. She once was strangling me. We had to watch out for each other. Or they had matches and a knife allowed. She was kneeling over me, burning the matches and dropping them down my eyes.”
“Investigator [ppor. Jan Broz] always had a gun in front of me on the table when I went to interrogation. Two or three more did the beating. They said, "Write down all the addresses of your relatives." I said I had no relatives. Got smacked. ´You have to write them all.´ When I did not want to do that, they put me in the corner on a kind of a triangular seat. They took my head and beat me as long as the blood was spraying on the floor, on the walls. Then the three caught me and forced me to lick it off. Such a disgrace... I would never get naked before and they left me there all naked, just for laughter.”
Ludmila Šeflová, née Šimková, was born in the native farm in Lipiny on 7 June, 1934. The Šimeks family kept a farm for centuries. During World War II, they were allegedly hiding guerrillas and paratroopers. Two fires occurred at the beginning of 1948 as a precursor to the coming misfortune. Václav Šimek, the father of the witness, refused to join the agricultural cooperative. The family was closely watched on the farm by the state security spies, among whom a brother-in-law, Jaroslav Šourek, was „distinguished.“ Václav Šimek Jr. served five years of basic military service in the Auxiliary Technical Troops. He returned home in 1955. The same year on 20 June, the secret police arrested Václav Šimek Sr. and four days later also the witness herself. Followed by three months of beating and humiliation in the custody of the secret police in Bartolomějská Street in Prague, the investigation led by Jan Brož. Ludmila Šeflová and her father were sentenced for high treason, and the witness left the court with the decision to serve ten years in prison. She went through the Ruzyne, Pankrác and Pardubice prisons and the correctional labour camp in Želiezovce, where she suffered severe spinal injury. In 1960 amnesty her father and she were released. They could not come back home to the nationalized farm, which was occupied by an agricultural cooperative. The state administration decided that she ought to live with her brother and his wife. In 1960, she married father´s former fellow prisoner, Josef Šefl. The witness was reportedly under police supervision until 1989. She had trouble locating and retaining her job, because employers could not bear to tolerate frequent interrogation of the secret police. She died in 2023.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
