"This was taboo at home, he never said this, we were never allowed to talk about politics. So I actually only found out about it here, because I didn't understand why I wasn't admitted to the secondary technical school when I was studying well. So then my dad said that he had a criminal record, and they never talked about it - not even afterwards. After the Velvet Revolution he could say anything, he didn't want to talk about it."
"We also had to write such a thing at the time that we had made a mistake. It was such a beautiful paper that the communists invented. And in order to keep peace, even our boss, who was like normal, everything, never us, told us: 'Look, I'll advise you, sign it, so that we have peace, so that they don't put some communist here.' So I signed there, or I had to write that I was mistaken, I don't know now, I guess I was... there was some kind of rubbish and then I wrote 'Mistaken, Štěpánová '. And we all did that."
"Unfortunately, Daddy was accused wrongly, of course, by a communist who wanted to make some extra money on the construction site, because Daddy was a construction manager. Well, and Daddy, because he was from the village, and he was just so righteous and didn't want to, so he paid for it a bit, so this communist, in case Daddy would like to say something somewhere, reported that Daddy wanted to steal. Well, that's the way it used to be when the communists made something up. That's what I have to say, we used to call them commies, so it's clear who I'm talking about. So they didn't know properly what to sentence him to, so in the end [they said] he endangered the general telecommunications network in Prague, which was stupid, but so he was sentenced after a year, to Jáchymov of course, but because he wasn't a big political prisoner he could have been in the surface mines."
Drahomíra Štěpánová, née Pokorná, was born on 13 April 1946 in Prague. Her father worked as a construction manager and in 1949 was falsely accused of wanting to steal materials. He was sentenced to work in the Jáchymov mines. Drahomíra Štěpánová and her mother, who was pregnant at the time, had to move to Žižkov to a flat on the fourth floor without a lift. Her father contracted tuberculosis in the mines and was discharged, infecting six-year-old Drahomíra with the disease at home. She only found out about her father‘s imprisonment when she was not admitted to a secondary technical school. She eventually managed to be admitted to the school and worked as a designer. In 2024 she was living in Prague.
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!
