“In the autumn 1948 daddy was imprisoned as he allegedly gave a leaflet with the president Beneš's speech. I remember I was in Sokol. At that time all these organizations were restored. I started to go back to Sokol. I came back home from Sokol and my mum sayd: ´Dad got locked up.´ We had a big garden, there was a pond in the lower part. I went to the pond, sat down and cried. I remember that. And I could not understand how my honest and just dad could could have gone to jail. Nobody knew why. Allegedly he gave somebody this leaflet with the portrait of the president Beneš, who had previously resigned. ´How long was he locked up for?´ - ´Only for half a year. They accused him of being a participant of Nechanic, that he was the organizer of the so called Nechanice coup. It was all construed. That he was hiding the English at home and that had connections with the West. And believe me, we have not heard of them ever again, after they drove them to the station.”
“After graduation I was employed for 14 days in Železný Brod, my father was released after five years from prison, so I told my supervisor, whether he would let me go home after fourteen days as my father was coming back. I did not tell you yet that my dad was then taken to Liberec. He did not understand at all, why he was locked up, what kind of a mad thing it was. He was placed in a solitary room for half a year. He had only two times three meters in there with a single bed there and had to walk around all day. In the morning they locked the bed to the wall, so that he could not sit or lie down, only at night. And when he lied down in the evening, they were shining light in his eyes all night. Then he was in Příbram, in the Vojna camp, there were the uranium mines, and then he was in the uranium mines in Jáchymov until the end of the imprisonment. My dad said, "There was my university, there were so many professors, doctors and educators, I learned so much from them.”
“In the meantime, before my dad came back from jail, my mother was forced to join the cooperative. Before she did, she got portrayed her as a ground squirrel holding two sacks of grain that they had found during our house search for not giving away the obligatory ratios. It was all for sowing. They made the backers´ window screen in the square in Sobotka.”
“Following 1948 they had made various checks in agriculture, if they did not sow more or less, all the inventories were done, persecutions in order to eliminate private farming. The order came that we have to scatter DDT in the field. In our country, where we used to fertilize only using normal manure, it was ecologically managed. My dad refused: "I will not scatter it on our field, not this shit." Father's brother John said, "Please, we will be persecuted. I'm going to do it. " Daddy say, "Do what you want, they will not leave us in peace anyway!" So he went to scatter. He came back all white, as he breathed in the powder called DDT. After a while he got cancer and died at the age of fifty.”
“In the meantime, before my dad came back from jail, my mother was forced to join the cooperative. Before she did, she got portrayed her as a ground squirrel holding two sacks of grain that they had found during our house search for not giving away the obligatory ratios. It was all for sowing. They made the backers´ window screen in the square in Sobotka.”
Jaroslava Svatošová, née Brixí, was born on May 1, 1938 in Sobotka as the oldest of three children, on a farm that her family owned for centuries. In 1945 the German soldiers chased approximately 10000 prisoners of various nationalities from Russia via Sobotka. Some of them fled, three Englishmen and five Russians were hiding at the witness´ family, others hiding in the woods around the castle Kost. In 1948 the father Jindřich Brixi got imprisoned first time for six months. The family was still persecuted; the father refused to enter the agricultural cooperative and was imprisoned again in 1953. He was sentenced for five years. Jaroslava could not study. In the same year, despite the prohibition of school inspector Červinka, she was admitted to the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Turnov. Thanks to the courage of the director Bezemek she finished her studies, but was not accepted. Professor Prudič from SUPŠ offered her his place in the Severoznak in Železný Brod. Jaroslav worked there for five years. In 1963 she married, and with her husband, Jiří Laušman, moved to Harrachov, where two daughters were born. In 1982, Jaroslava and Jiří got divorced, one year later Jaroslava married Václav Svatoš, and they have been living together in Turnov until today.
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