Anna Staňková

"I was in Syrovice near Brno and my niece, the second girl, was born there, and she squawked like a parrot at night, so I didn't sleep. So, I left by a night train, I had to save time, so I wanted to go to Ostrava by a night train. There was still time, so I sat down, in a moment he came to me, I already knew he was a State Security officer, they had those brown leather coats, he sat across from me, I knew what he was. Well sure, they didn't hide it. I had an apple, so we split the apple, he covered me with his coat because he knew I would sleep. I slept deeply because the girl was crying so much that I didn't sleep at all. And we travelled all night, I slept deeply, only sometimes I saw that something was moving on my legs, so I looked to see if the coat was coming off, no, the man was sleeping and the coat was in place. When I got off the tram in Poruba, I already felt that another person was following me, so I slowed down, he slowed down too, so I turned around, I was always angry with them: 'You're right, I'm following you.' He carried a bottle of milk, innocently, I immediately knew what and how. It was early in the morning, he followed me across the park to the apartment and said, 'So we heard about you making a virtuous woman out of yourself. And I say, “So what?” So, there were at least three or four of them, 'we saw how virtuous you are, what you let happen, what you like. But you know what happened at night.' And I say: 'Did something happen? So, if something was happening, I was asleep, you saw it and you were awake, so why didn't you wake me up?' Well, those were the conversations. 'What do you want all the time?' — 'You'll see, we won't talk about it now, you'll see in the future.' He walked me to the door."

"I was in Poruba in the Ostrava region and I had a university colleague from Brno, she had five children, so I had the youngest one with me for the holidays. It was after noon, he lay down on the bed and we were resting after lunch, and a man came and said that I had to go with him. 'The car is outside, so get dressed and let´s go.' I said, 'I have a baby here.' - 'We don't care.' So, I went to my neighbor and asked her to take care of the little boy, and I went with them. Of course, they had the psychological methods, we drove through, so they would make an impression, so we drove through underground, through dark corridors. I knew what it was going to be about, that it was an interrogation, I knew that people were going to it, but I didn't know anything about it. People didn't know anything either, I was just told by those who had gone through it: 'Don't name anyone, because they immediately take the names and go after those people.' So, they brought me in, I don't remember the details, but it probably went something like this, they kept asking and talking and forcing me to do something: 'Sign this paper.' I don't know how they reasoned, but I calmly signed the paper for them. Although I could have assumed that they would fill out the paper I signed with whatever they wanted, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and on the other hand, they did what they wanted anyway."

"When I used to go to that choir to sing, a German teacher used to go there. She sang with us, but we knew her so casually. A German teacher, but always polite, nice, but she had no contact with us. Then she came, apparently she already felt the end of that Germany, I don't know, so she came to sing in that choir. Of course, everyone recognized her, no one would say anything because they didn't want to harm themselves. But there was a coup, the Germans wore white armbands or some kind of marking, and suddenly nobody wanted to talk to that woman. All of a sudden, we were all virtuous and terrible patriots, but I´m not into it, at all. Of course, I'm little stupid in this regard, I'll do the exact opposite, I can't see a person being hurt. So I went in public, I didn't go with her before, I always grabbed her arm in public and I walked with her down the street from that church, with that Marenka, that was her name. So, I took her to her mother, with whom she lived in a villa near the Jevíčko intersection. Then she was so open with me, she told me some things. She was terribly devastated because she was caught by some, I think, a communist from Jevíčko, he knew she was a second-class person, so he raped her, and she was extremely devastated by that."

"But what I think was bearable, at least for me, I saw that the inhuman regime was not inhuman. It was just an apprentice, they were just students of that Lenin, Stalin, that crazy regime. Because they at least did that, for example, that the crimes would not be seen, and especially I felt that way in my childhood, there was a worker who came to us, a German, and he kept an eye on these things so that they would happen. But they never took from us, for example when there were so many children, they did not take our potatoes or grain, not all of it, as the communists did, they took everything away. Neighbors brought something in their baskets and gave tickets and so on so that the children would not die of hunger. So, they never did that.'