Ing. Václav Tuček

“I remember Dad still telling from the camp, like when there was a 'counter-revolution' in Hungary in 1956, as the Imre Nagy was hanged there. So they were afraid, everyone was afraid in the republic. It was perhaps gendarmerie and military mobilization and prison service; they were all mobilized. Everyone was armed, and everyone was expecting something to go wrong in Budapest. The day that this broke out, and when it got settled there somehow, all the prisoners in all the camps in Pribram stood outside in rags all night, with armed guards from all sides facing them. The watchtowers and everyone was armed, and they stood with their bare hands in front of those barracks. They were afraid even in those prisons that there would be a revolt. They learned what was happening there. It was transferred to the barracks through the work. They were scared, they were really scared, then. So they stood there all night. Then it was raining in the morning too.”

“When they locked up dad, or arrested him, halfway between Bučovice and Heřmanice on the road when he was riding a horse with a horse. He had to turn around and go home to tie the horses wearing his high boots, and Hubertus coat. He wasn't allowed to take anything or change his clothes, he just went to serve three years in prison with only what he had in his pocket. At that time my mother was eight months pregnant.”

“I went from school in Spytice, it was on November 29, 1955, and there were two black cars on the green near the bell tower. It was already afternoon; we had an afternoon school and it was evening and it was getting dark early in November and the weather was still cloudy. And I walked from the village green across the pasture to the back of the farmhouse, and behind one of the gates in front of that barn's shield was a policeman in a blue uniform, standing there waiting. Well, I came home, so I looked, I knew, because everything was talked about at home. I was already informed what was going to happen. Grandpa always informed me of everything... and I met my dad on the porch. We just said goodbye and then I didn't see him for three years. At home it was all just crying and sorrows.”

“He (dad) was on the third, in Bytíz. So he first went down in a mine like a miner and said it was better, because no guards had ever gone down there, and civilians had always gone down with them. Normal miners who went to work there. There he got into conversation with different people and learned different things, and he also learned that his dad died on December 1956. In 1956 mum wrote it to him in a letter asking them to release him to attend the funeral, and the letters were destroyed by censorship. They didn't even reach Dad, never got delivered to him. And he only learnt that his dad had died in three months down from a known prisoner down the shaft, who came from our neighborhood in Vilémov, Točice, he was named Mr. Kudrna, and they wrote it to him too. But there was no censorship, and he only learned of that letter afterwards. And down below the ground he only told Dad. So that is how dad learned that his own father had died. And grandpa actually died because of my dad's arrest and all the stress.”

“We couldn't choose the lawyer, who was appointed in court. They gave a lawyer to my dad, who of course did not care at all. So when it was that year, we still took it. When he got a year sentence, we accepted it. We thought it was not alll that bad. But to those comrades it did not seem enough, so the prosecutor appealed, dad did not. The prosecutor appealed,and in two months we got two years more.”