Vladimír Talášek

"My father was honoured with the Czechoslovak War Cross, and President Beneš was in Hranice at the time. It was only when I was preparing all the documents and things that are stored at the regional military headquarters, including my father's uniform and his last words to us. This must have taken years, because I didn't want to tear my mother up with the things she had to go through either. But then we talked about it many times when I was able to understand those things. Just as I had talked to both my uncles before my other uncle was arrested and sentenced to Leopoldov, where he spent several years completely unnecessarily on some kind of denunciation. This happened in 1957 and I wouldn't have known it. At that time I was studying at the University of Chemical Technology, I was called to the military administration and there a young lieutenant colonel told me what a terrible act my uncle had committed."

"I knew very quickly where I was placed. We were a bourgeois family because my grandmother had built another floor of the house and that was an offense that could not be replaced by anything in the eyes of the people who took power. Because it was a fundamental horror to do something, to build something, to put your own money into it. But I understood that later. Not so late. At the age of fourteen, my grandmother, who lived until I was seventeen... At that time, the people who were most responsible for the communist coup, Mr. Slánský and others, were on trial. And my grandmother, when they were passing death sentences on them and the families were signing their names to it, my grandmother said, 'Vládik, the gang is already hanging each other, as they were taught to do in their Moscow.'"

“My uncle was then kicked out of the army, but still kept his general rank. But the uncle said something... The people, who survived Nazi prison, used to meet up, he was imprisoned for twelve years in Kassel and finally in Mírov. Then he said something in a cafe and was denounced. And so he got another four years to serve in Leopoldov prison between 1957 and 1961. And when he got there, there were some high SS commanders and said: ‚Herr General, Sie sind wieder da.‛ That must have been huge. And he told me: ‚Vládík, you got to be smarter that these bastards, as are they only waiting for any openness to get you.”

“So I had to know not being able to say ‚Hitler bastard‛ already in 1943 or 1944. Then I began to perceive it strongly, when the Red Army came here along with the top commanders. And the wife of the Soviet army major, who my mum played the piano for, told her: ‚Mrs. Talášková, you are up to some heavy stuff. You are going to experience something I did, as my parents are still in exile in Archangelsk.‛ Of course that was said amongst the adults and I didn’t really know about it. But soon after 1948, I already knew, as we became the hated bourgeoisie only for my grandma built another floor to the house for hard-earned money.”

“Back then my mum and uncle spoke Czech and also my uncle could naturally speak Polish. My mum not much. Granny spoke German, some Hungarian, as she stayed with her aunt in Budapest, who was a milliner. Obviously she could speak Polish. Simply the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, whatever it was, provided a larger life space and start for many nations, which took it the way people wanted. It is only good that the world war finally ended up with the Allies winning, but people lived their lives and woke up in the republic. They used to say, it was a kind of small and narrow. My grandpa traded coal and used to go to Poznan, in former Prussia. And he also traded cloths and textile, and used to go to Lemberk, or L’viv and Tarnov. And my granny told me that he missed it until the end of his life. He died in 1929 and still kept saying: ‚It is so terribly small here, I cannot make any business.‛ That is the kind of feeling the people had and remained within them.”