Dana Vargová

“I would like to point out one marvelous essay by our great author Karel Čapek. Most of you will certainly know it. It says it all much better that I had said it. It is his essay ´Why I am not a Communist,´ which he wrote in 1924. It was published in our country last year before Christmas. I have it here in the anthology of his political essays, volume one, it is called ´From Man to Man.´ He wrote there that communism is a broadly based attempt to achieve international misunderstanding.”

Interviewer: “Some twenty people were coming here every day. You must have been under the StB surveillance.” D.V.: “Not twenty people every day, but sometimes that many people did come. We were watched by the StB. We even went for an interrogation with Julek. What a thing it was! Julek was summoned to the StB office. He wasn’t able to walk there by himself; he needed somebody else’s help. I went with him that day. Julek made fun of it. He told me: ´Mom, you know that old hat which you use when you work in the garden? You will put it on, and you will push me in the wheelchair, just like Mrs. Miller did with the Good Soldier Schweik.´ He insisted on it. And so I really did go there with him in that hat. What else can I tell you? We didn’t take it seriously. We got to the office by the elevator. The police station was at the place where the fitness centre is today. We arrived to the office and Julek immediately began making problems, claiming he wanted a transcript of the interrogation. They told him that he had no right to get a copy and that he was mistaken. The interrogation began – who comes to see you, and so on. Julek responded that nobody comes to visit us. They claimed that we were organizing seminars in our house. – No, we don’t organize anything. He denied everything. Among these friends of ours from the Dominican Order, there were some who were lawyers who they him advised to deny everything. And now Julek was showing all these friends, showing them that they had to deny everything.”

“Unfortunately, I also remember something from the liberation when the Soviet army was passing through. I remember it precisely, because I was already nine years old. Two young ladies from Olomouc were living with us; they were often coming to stay with us during the summer holidays. That was a custom among the middle class. They were afraid of the front passing through Olomouc, and so they came to us. Our aunt with our uncle and cousin were also staying with us, so we had a full house. The first wave of the Soviet army was passing through. Those were the soldiers who were in the front line. It was rumoured that they were criminals whom they had sacrificed; they knew that they would die. It was a bunch of evil soldiers. Their staff was housed in a farm above our house. We, the children, saw it all. One drunken Soviet soldier came there and he saw these girls from Olomouc. My mom and aunt were also nice women who were still young. The soldier was drunk. He began chasing them, in a vile way. I won’t go into detail. When my mom saw it, she jumped through the window inside that farm where they staff and the officers stayed. One officer came immediately, and there were two soldiers with him. They grabbed the drunkard who was chasing the young ladies. We, the children, we watching all this. It was terrible. These two soldiers grabbed him, and they made him stand in our yard, and boom. They shot him right in front of our eyes.”

“Some instructor of theirs had arrived there, reading them instructions from the local Communist Party unit. He was the first to report the presence of two immensely dangerous counter-socialist elements in the Šumperk region. According to him, one of them was supposed to be Mr. Hajný and the other one some Julek Varga. There was a teacher from the musical school present there whom I knew from the church. She was in the party but also went to church. She couldn’t resist it, raised her hand and said: ‘Comrade, this doesn’t make sense. Mr. Varga can’t even stand on his feet or write. He is severely handicapped and this has to be a mistake of sorts.’ He replied: ‘No, comrade, it is not a mistake. We know all of this about him but he is very dangerous and had already spoilt all of our youth here. He has a negative influence on much of the youth.’”

“What happened was that the farmers had to deliver the required quota from their harvests. They had a large estate. My father-in-law had met all the requirements completely; he even had documents certifying this. Still, they needed to imprison them anyway, because they needed to confiscate their property. They needed some little pretext in the court, and therefore a court trial was staged. My husband was not present there, but my brother-in-law and my mother-in-law, my husband’s mom, were. All this was recorded in the file in the court. His lawyer submitted the documents, proving that father-in-law had fulfilled all the required deliveries, because he had purchased crops from other people in order to be able to meet the quotas. That was because they hadn’t produced the amount that they had been told to deliver. My father-in-law had this document, but the judge crumpled the paper, and threw it into a rubbish bin. He claimed that father-in-law was still an enemy, and so on. He had been sentenced.”

“Father bishop Hrdlička had administered the funeral. Because we are very good friends I told him everything and he then in his speech really said it all and made all the readings. The Dominicans were present to the funeral and his friends read the psalms. It was just the way he wanted it to be. It follows that he was completely reconciled with his death. When we all listened to the reading and especially the sermon of father bishop we also became reconciled – at least many told me afterwards. After the funeral we met at our place – we had still lived at Vyhlídka back then. There were many people there and father bishop. We were also reconciled with Julek now hopefully assisting us from up there. From our point of view and mine in particular, it was necessary for him to pass away so that he wouldn’t have to carry the suffering on his shoulders any longer.”

Interviewer: “How did your son cope with the worsening of his disease? It was gradually getting worse.” D.V.: “After he became a Christian, he considered it as... to explain it simply, I would say that God gives such a difficult burden only to those, about whom he knows that they will be able to endure it. That’s probably how he tried to see it.” Interviewer: “And how did you see it? It had to be difficult for you, too.” D.V.: “It was not easy for me. And before he became a Christian, things hadn’t been fine, either. When he was a teenager, he hasn’t coped with it yet. He was quite angry when he was a teenager. When we bathed him, it was painful for him, for example. Once he even used a swear-word to me. I gave him a slap and my husband then scolded me in front of him. For my husband it was difficult to bear, to slap little Julek... but later on, as he was gradually becoming a Christian, he grew more…”

“He claims and always has claimed that no priest really made him believe in God. Priest Hrubiš had played his role there but rather in the sense that he used to send Julek’s peers to debate with him. He himself was in a way fond of finding a path to God, spirituality and his later activities through his own studies and readings.”