Ing. Ivan Vrána

"He was convicted of sedition against the republic. And sometimes it feels like something out of the Black Barons. Then when we heard that, we heard that somewhere in the station they were reloading planks onto a car, and now a train was going through carrying some tanks. And when it came through, Dad was supposed to ask these guys how many tanks there were. The guys said, 'We don't know,' and he told them about eight or however many there were. And he told them they'd be bad spies if they didn't know how many there were. And they condemned him for being a spy. It's laughable today. Unfortunately, he got the rest of his sentence served for that and two years added. He had eight years left - or a total of... in 1949, they sentenced him to eighteen years plus the two years, so he should have served twenty years, and he served eighteen years of that. Then they let him go home on amnesty only in 1968."

"It's not that I'm such a hero, but we didn't take part in some by-election under the communists and they did not want to accept our children into any kindergarten as a result of that. They said, 'You didn't vote for us, so you're not entitled to kindergarten.' I said, 'When did I not vote for you? Well, there were some by-elections, some comrade died and another comrade had to be elected in his place - and we forgot all about it and didn't go to the polls. And so they sweetened it for me. She was looking for - it was quite difficult on one salary in Prague - she was looking for a job. So she found it in the Masokombinat in Písnice, where they gave her a nursery for a girl at that time, because the older boy was already in school."