Hana Smekalová roz. Polanská

“My father was in such pain that they had to come back; and later, they were walking down Wenceslas Square (Václavské náměstí), near Pestchek Palace. And unfortunately, they met Wolner, who went out for a lunch or something and was quite surprised to see them. As Wolner had investigated my father´s case.” - “And who was Wolner?” - “Wolner was a Czech who joined the Germans, he was an investigator and had been dealing with the resistance. He was in charge of those two men who came to ambush us in Žitná. My father and my mother were his most important case, and all the time, he tried to find out what my father and my mother kept from themselvess, as he wanted to get the whole group. My father claimed that there were 180 of them. He said that you would know just this person above you and bellow you, the rest you would never meet. And the person above my father, Kirchberger, was a young crime writer. And he did well as a writer but he was a loathsome character. So he got all of them in it, even my father. My father didn´t betray anyone. So after they met Wolner, they would lock him up again. He didn´t go to Buchenwald right away, first they sent him to Theresienstad (Terezín), to the Small Fortress (Malá pevnost).”

“The arrest was a horrible thing to behold. And Věra was with us, our housemaid, a young woman of twenty-four, whom my parents employed so she didn´t have to go to Germany for this total deployment. Three Gestapo men came and they did such a mess. As I little girl, I liked the fact that one of them, being bald, hit his head while searching a closet where salami had been hanging, and there was this bump on his head. Věra had to put a wet towel on his head and I enjoyed the fact that he had been whacked. The rest would search our stuff, cut it all over, they would put my father in a chair in a separate room and search just everything. And as we moved to a new flat, my parents were still getting new furniture. And even after my father had been arrested, they would bring us a piece of furniture that hadn´t been delivered yet. They arrested my father on March 17th, and two days later, they came for my mother.”

“In the end, my mother had to go to Řepy, to serve the few remaining months of her sentence. There she met Milada Horáková, with whom she slept on a plank bed. My mother had this dark hair to her waist, which to her surprise they wouldn´ t cut. And in her hair, she would smuggle in a cross with Jesus Christ whom they would revere with Milada Horáková in secret. Milada Horáková would encourage my mother. She would tell her: 'Don´t cry, you have two girls at home, I also have one of mine, but we have to get through this.' My mother would say that Milada was so brave and such a strong personality that she felt like an ant compared to her. And they remained friends even after the war, as Milada would visit my mother as a customer. Later, her daughter had been living with her father somewhere in England, and Milada had been persecuted again during the totalitarian regime. My mother said that Communists hated her because she was so smart and relentless.”

“When my mother had been released and my father was still in jail, he sent her some blood-stained clothes. My mother was terrified, wondering what that meant, but then she understood that he was sending her these written messages. And after she realised, like as you have this trousers with an elastic band, she would put tapes in, on which she would write messages and put those secret notes in the clothes. And I admired her for how tiny her writing was. She had thin pencils which she would sharpen herself. I didn´t know how my father managed to get such a pencil so he could write back. So that was the way they had been communicating.”

“After that, my father was in that so-called “movie theater”, waiting to be interrogated. And Julius Fučík had been there also at that time. Before or after the interrogation, he had been standing next to my father, with their hands behind their backs. After he came back, our father told us that if they would tell us in school how much of a hero Fučík was, we should keep our mouths shut, but the truth was that he gave away everything he could. We asked our father whether he considered himself a hero. And my father said: 'No. I always saw myself as a coward. But they would slap you once, you would lose one tooth, then a second slap, a second tooth. They would hogtie you and beat you up, and you would think that they would beat you no matter if you would talk or not. So why would I tell them anything. And you would realise that you just couldn´t tell them anything.”