Zdena Zábrodská, roz. Krejčová

“In the morning me and Miluna went to school. She went to Masaryk’s square in Pilsen and I went to a medical school in Tylova street. We arrived with the morning train and I went to school. By noon we had lectures. As I was returning, I passed by the Republic square where people had already gathered. I hadn’t minded and would have carried on. But people from the Škoda factory were pouring in and I couldn’t come to terms with that. So I went along and I had shouted and all. But then they arrested us. Láďa Davidovič’s sister was also there and she got imprisoned. They caught us around the town hall, lined us up and checked up on us. Some of the people were then locked up in the Bory prison. We got expelled from school. I don’t know what they did to the people who hadn’t attended school.”

“Tanks had arrived, and drove around our cottage in Spálené Poříčí. It was trembling like this. They drove to Brdy. They had crowded in and only Václav Havel drove them out. For instance, 1 May took place and our children would say: ‘Grandpa, please, don’t put up those Soviet flags.’ He couldn’t even sleep anymore. He said: ‘If I don’t put them up, the Russians will come to get their morning bread rolls in their tanks and shoot our house in pieces.’ They replied: ‘Doesn’t matter, the regime will fall anyway.’”

“At first he was coming here from Moscow, and Gottwald was all mad about him, but later he was saying things and derisive rhymes about him like this one: ‘Prague has hundred towers and Mrs. Marta has a big ass. (president Gottwald’s wife – transl.’s note), they were discussing this one, too. He asked: ‘Comrade Gottwald, how is your wife doing?’ But it went so far that he got an order – Gottwald got sick in Moscow, he contracted some kind of influenza – and in Moscow they ordered him: ‘Get rid of Slánský. We kind of do not need him anymore.’ And he saw, his daughter said it, too, he saw that he was really taking a turn to the worst, and he already quit. He said that above all he was now interested in his children. But she said: ‘But he has really entangled himself in the politics so much.’ He was already horribly tainted with politics. And nobody was really surprised that it took a turn like this. He should have stepped down earlier or not tried to push his way upward. I don’t know, but there was certainly some wrongdoing done. Our mom, who knew them, would say: ‘He does not want to be a trader, he wants to be somebody higher.’ That’s what she would probably say. They showed his hanging. It was shown like this: they hanged them and two of them were sitting by them and putting out cigarettes on their arms and legs and they had burn marks on their bodies everywhere. Communists! When Hitler did these things, he did it because he was their enemy. But now, these people have been long-time co-workers, fellow Party members, and then they began to execute one another! Not only among themselves, but they turned you into a class enemy and off you went. Well, that was what I have experienced.”

“In June 1953 when were walking from our classes we suddenly saw what was happening and we – I and another girl – joined them, but nothing happened. We then went home, but they identified us and we just thought: ‘They cannot even do anything to us, there were so many people that they would not be able to check on every one of them. They don’t even know...’ But the notice did arrive to our school. Eva, a friend of mine, was there with me. Both of us got identified, and there were two more girls, who were from another village, and they found out about them as well. The school received four orders for expulsion, I think. We were all from the same class and we knew each other. Eva, who was there with me, eventually stayed in school, but I had to leave. It was because in Doubravka where she lived, she lived almost next house to that bastard and they went to him and she managed to get her expulsion order revoked. But I received the notice, and so I went. The letter was sent to our home, and it stated that I was expelled from school for un-socialist conduct and that they were offering me a job in a brick-kiln in Stod. Grandpa – my father – exclaimed: ‘They must be crazy. Do they think that we will send our only daughter to Stod?!’ He snatched the letter and he burnt it. He opened the stove and he threw it all in there. That was it. See, they have never reproached me for it for as long as they were alive. But still, I got expelled from school, and I was eighteen or seventeen. Imagine the situation: they closed down my grandpa’s shop and they forced him to work in a communal centre. And then I came home to them like that, a young girl without a job.”

“There was another family who was affected as well, the miller Zábrodský’s family (the family of her husband’s, ed,’s note). The authorities closed down their mill, and they imprisoned their father here in Pilsen in some kind of an enclosure, I remember that I was told that he even contracted typhoid while he was held in that enclosure. Well, it was horrible. They evicted them from the mill. There were five children. None of us remained in Poříčí, because it was impossible to live there! They would have destroyed us all! They made my husband work in the forest and transport large trunk trees from the forest! You can’t even imagine what kind of work it was: they were wading in snow up to their waists, and they had to cut the trunks which were falling down and it was freezing like crazy. We were still living in our parents’ house until our daughter Jára was born. We moved out while she was still a little baby. Then we lived in various mills. My husband worked for a company, but we stayed in various places. Well, we were taking the toll. We moved into one mill where grandpa worked as a manager, and then we lived in other places, grandpa was going to work all the way to Klatovy, for instance, where he was working for the company, and even to Pilsen, but that was later, only after they began to consider him trustworthy. We didn’t even get a loan as newlyweds, nor birth allowance when our daughter was born, nothing! We simply didn’t get anything. Do it in any way you want, if you are able to act as revolutionaries, then you have to manage on your own. Daughter Jára would have liked to become a dentist, but it was no way.”