“From my viewpoint, the interest was to break up the family and to acquire the property of the victims. It wasn’t done on political grounds but it was basically a theft. I'm not saying that what happened then is not happening today. This was done in order to steal the property of those who had been persecuted. They used the embezzlement paragraph and thus the amnesty did not apply to us. This worked out well for the communists. The fact that they destroyed assets and the goodwill of people who worked that way, that the state organizations were not able to accomplish, that was basically a side effect for them. Finally, the Communist Party did not work not individual people, but for the people. The difference is quite large, because while individuals can not be manipulated, the people can be manipulated. I think that the Communist Party of today is still bent on that.”
“As I said, my biggest worry was for my family. Thank God, my wife survived it well, those six years. We could see each other once in three months, but not always. I saw her for the first time after my arrest after 9 months, in October or November. 9 months after they had put me in Pankrác.”
“In my opinion, the whole affair was clearly linked to the interest to destroy private individuals who enjoyed working on these projects that they liked. Those organizations for which the projects were carried out, they were glad that someone was doing it for them. I already said that in the situation of those days, they were not able to have it done by the existing project-planning and design institutions. After four years, in 1959, when the politicians began to make plans for an amnesty at the occasion of some 60th anniversary of something, they came for me as I already told you. I see the entire interest in the breaking up of families and gaining the possession of the victims.”
“First of all, they knew that I would tell people almost publicly or individually what kind of crap Bolshevism was. I knew it from the past, from the stories of my dad’s friends, when I was at an age when I already understood what they were talking about. I knew what was happening in the Soviet Union. These people were former legionnaires in their majority. I knew about the events in 1937, the pogroms between the army and the military elite. I saw the people who were engaged in the street committees, I saw what kind of people they were. They probably knew all of this about me but they didn’t know how to shoot me down. Because those people to whom I told these things, I insisted that it would all end one day, although I didn’t think that it would end in 1948. To the contrary, I said: ‘Look, it will take some time. I can’t say when, but it won’t be over in a year or two’. This they knew about me. Then they also knew that there was a villa whose residents could easily have been moved out and then it would certainly have been useful. However, I don’t know who liked it so much.”
The academic architect Jiří Vahala was born in 1922 in the family of the architect František Vahala. After passing his school-leaving exam in 1940, he enrolled to study architecture at the School of Applied Arts, where he graduated in 1944 as a student of Professor Pavel Janák’s studio. In the years 1944-1945, he worked as a land surveyor of buildings of historical districts of Prague. In 1945, he married and gradually had three children. After the war, he worked as an architect at the land office. After 1948, the activities of independent architects were banned and thus he joined the Stavoprojekt association. In the years 1954-1956, he worked in their free time in addition to his own work on projects for agricultural cooperatives - preparing zoning plans and project documentation. On February 25, 1959, he was arrested and interrogated for overpricing the invoices for work done for the agricultural cooperatives. The trumped-up charges resulted in a six-year prison sentence for the alleged overpricing of the contracts. A part of the sentence was a confiscation of his property. He temporarily lost half of the villa where he lived with his family. During his term in the Pankrác prison, he worked in the design office of the prison. He was finally released from prison in 1965. After his return from prison, he returned to his previous profession of architect and designer. Mr. Jiří Vahala has lived for all of his life in Prague in the villa, which was built in 1924 by his father.
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