"One time, my mother was living by the tower block in Fleming Square and we were sitting on a bench there and somehow, I don't remember how it happened, the undercover guy came and said, 'I want the documents from you now,' and I know it was the guy who kept coming to us. We didn't have them. I didn't have it because somehow my mother needed my passport to go to the office to do something. He got so horrible that he said, 'We know all about you. We won't take our eye off you.' The phone was tapped too. My mother knew that. [He said,] 'You come with me now and I'll arrest you.' He just wanted to arrest me for it. And Alex got mad. He didn't understand what was being said. But he could see by me that I started shaking and tears started flowing. When he saw that, he suddenly started. He didn't speak Czech, but he said, 'Me English, me not this' In English he said he couldn't stand it. And this, this stupid little young man turned around and looked at him and suddenly started, 'I know in England in the Air Force.' And now he started going 'brrr' on the sidewalk like this, with his hands like an airplane. Like a madman, like a madman. Alex was looking at him, I was looking at him. And now he's going, in Czech, 'Do you know that Mr., I don't know, Vošátko, who used to fly like that?' I stood like shocked. Alex was saying to him in English: 'I don't understand and I didn't know Mr. Vošátko, but I knew other pilots.' He knew how to say it and he said: 'Translate it for him.' And he said, 'All right. Well, if you know the airmen.' And suddenly he was like so kind. It was like a black theater. I couldn't even stumble home. And Alex got really angry. He said, 'I'm going to complain about this treatment. This kind of behaviour out of the blue. I'm not used to this. I said, 'I can't stand this.' I told him he should be glad it turned out this way."
"But then I learned that I was suspected of espionage. I got into a family that wanted to take me as an au pair somewhere abroad on holiday. Suddenly, they invited me and said they couldn't take me with them. I didn't know why. I thought, 'For God's sake, I'll go from one to the other. I can't move around on my own like this and nobody will explain anything to me.' Until I was invited to the home office, which is like our Bartolomějská, and there I was 'interviewed' for two days, first by two Eastern European officers and then only one remained. There I had to tell my whole life, not to leave anything out, even things that nobody knows, I had to tell, because I found that if I concealed something, it would turn against me - that I had concealed something and it was not worth it. It's better to tell it all at once. And somehow they put it together, and now I, as a member of the Communist Party... and the other thing is that if they let someone out of the Czech Republic for a long time, they always had a job to do."
"But at the last minute I was ordered to report immediately to Nové Hrady u Velenice, where there was a boarding school. I didn't know anything, so I went there and never got out. And there I experienced terrible things. I learned this afterwards - it's unbelievable that in the sixties the school was surrounded by wire, nobody was allowed to leave the school without permission. The secret police, who had it all under surveillance... They gave orders and did whatever they wanted, and I found out afterwards that they had chosen me according to a photograph. Then they found out about me, what kind of family I came from, because maybe we had some noblemen in the family. German, perhaps. That was again the chronicle my brother saw, but it was buried so the Russians wouldn't find it, or the Communists. So they decided that I was the right person to breed the working class combined with the intelligentsia, and that's why I was chosen. I don't have to tell you more, but at the beginning I wasn't so that I was immediately willing to submit to what they wanted me to do. They put me in a dark room where there was always light. First, they tied me to a chair to depress me enough to stop me from having a will of my own. So they succeeded in doing that, because when you're like that for a while without sleep and just under pressure, it may not be anything more... If it goes on for a while, you get to a state where you don't have your own will at all. If they told you to jump out the window, you'd jump out the window. That's the state they put me in. They wouldn't let me go out at all, not even to go home at first. Then, when I was so worked up, and there were all kinds of sexual demands, because there was the goal of reproducing the working class - I laugh now, but it was not funny at all - I got into such a state that I didn't care and I didn't even want to run away. So they finally let me go home, too, with the understanding that I wouldn't say anything. I didn't say anything to anyone either. It went on like that for two years, and then it just kind of blew up. I don't remember how. A committee came to the school and started to investigate."
Milena Watsonová, née Forštová, was born on 19 March 1938 in Prague. Her father, mathematician Ing. Vladimír Foršt, as a descendant of a wealthy landowning family, was persecuted by the communist authorities after 1948. Like his brother Eduard, he ended up in prison. Milena Watsonová studied Russian language and literature. In 1961, under unclear circumstances, she began teaching at the Secondary Agricultural School in Nové Hrady, where she later became a victim of sexual violence. The aggressor at the time falsely disguised his actions by posing as a State Security agent and psychologically and physically abused the young woman under threat of sanctions by the totalitarian apparatus. She eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Prague with Professor Vladimír Vondráček. On the recommendation of one of the doctors, she decided to emigrate. She traveled legally to Great Britain in 1967, which resulted in an investigation by the British Secret Service. They accused her of espionage. In 1968, when conditions in the then Czechoslovakia were relaxed, her brother Vladimir also went to the UK to study, but after a while he returned to his native country, where he died in 1985 in a tragic collision with an armoured personnel carrier on the way to the famous JZD Slušovice. With her first husband, Milena, then Walshová, later went to Tanzania for a year, where she suffered from malaria. Her second husband was the famous British painter and cartoonist Alex Noel Watson. At the time of the interview in 2023, she was living in Purley, near London, UK. She died on 2 May 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
