Jana Fialková

“A child whose father is in prison… no one makes a distinction whether for theft, murder or political reasons. I remember the first day I arrived at school after his arrest. The schoolmaster had me summoned to his office and asked about my dad. He demanded where he was, that they called from his job that he had not arrived in the morning. I was a good child, never lied but this time I lied for the first time. I told him he was at home, ill. He asked what his problem was and I said that his leg hurt. The schoolmaster came down on me, shouting that I was a lier, that he knew everything. So they knew everything the very next day and then the children started bullying me.”

“I had this idea I could go to university, the construction faculty. All assessments were fine, both from the school and from my work. The street committee did not write anything, so I got an assessment from the municipal committee. Everything was OK. I attended my job, prepared for the school-leaving exam, repeated my school lessons, my mum got ill with tuberculosis, was taken to hospital and I had to take care for the whole family. When everything looked well, they invited me to Ostrov shortly before Christmas and they told me that the man from the street committee, by the way a drunk who used to crawl on all four from the pub, wrote that he didn’t know me very well but that my father was unlikely to have changed his reactionary thinking. This was sufficient for the director to tear my application to pieces. I was devastated, I asked them, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I have done nothing wrong. In 1953 I was eleven, I even wasn’t in that square, why are you doing this to me?!’ Then the HR person told me a sentence which I will never forget: ‚Well, you see. Same as we cannot give a gun to a soldier who shoots well, when we are not sure that he would not turn the gun against us, we cannot provide you with education, since we don’t know that you wouldn’t turn it against us.”

“That was the sin. But he was punished for something totally different. As you can see in some documents, the aim was to punish the middle class. There are reports that workers from the Škoda factory started it, that’s true. It was a pretext so that the people from the Pilsen city council and all those who were in power would be able to get rid of inconvenient people.”

“We lost all money. They paid for all the cars just a few days before the reform. At that time the currency was one to five, but only up to a certain sum. Then it was one to fifty and one to five hundred. So the money completely lost its value. There was nothing out of it. My mum didn’t work, she had little children. Meanwhile we received a letter saying that we were to leave our home. We were to move to Božanov. My mum went to have a look there, but we would have died there. A derelict house, broken windows, a mother with three children. The she had this brilliant idea. We had our grandparents in Pilsen, Bílá hora, and they used to have a large farm, but now they were old, my grandfather was over seventy. When they arrived to move us out, we were no longer there. We were with my grandparents, lived in a single room, the rest of furniture was by my mum’s sisters. So we were already away and there we survived those three years when my dad was in prison.”

“Study at the secondary technical school was quite easy for me. My classmates had already left schools many years ago or they mostly had had economic education. I was good at mathematics and geometry, and mechanics and concrete – that was a no brainer for me. When I was to graduate, I got an idea – and the principal Maňas approved of it as well – that I would submit an application for the civil engineering college. I had the best recommendation from the school, and I had good references from my work, too, and even from the municipal council. But about four days before the deadline for submitting the applications, I was summoned to Ostrov and I was told that a certain gentleman from the neighbourhood committee had written a note that he did not know me personally and that he held no grudge against me, but that my dad had probably not changed his opinions. And that was sufficient for them to tear my application form. I was devastated, I was crying: ‘Why are you doing this to me?! I haven’t done anything! I had been only eleven years old at that time! And the whole family had been punished for that. So why are you still persecuting me?’ The principal’s deputy then said something which I will never forget for as along as I am alive: ‘We cannot give you education, it’s the same as when we cannot give a rifle to a soldier if we are not sure that he would not turn it against us.’ That was their reasoning. And it was over for me, because I nearly collapsed at that time. I was going to work, my mom was in hospital for about five months, and I was going to school and preparing for my final exams and I had to review the subjects from the eleven-year school such as geometry and other classes which were not taught so much at the secondary school. And another issue was that my brother was growing up and if I had gone to study at the college until let’s say my twenty-eight years of age, my parents would not have been able to keep my brother in school as well. And so I gave up.”

“He returned on January 26, 1956. He was sentenced for six years, then there was an amnesty in 1955, on the tenth anniversary of liberation. So his sentence was shortened from six years to four. He returned in three years. But perhaps there was something else behind it. As I learned later, he had been beaten in the prison and they did not want him to be a proof of that so they sent him home. My dad was not allowed to tell us anything. But gradually I put things into their places, my mum hinted at something. Then I realised that when we moved to Kyselka, my dad went to a hospital, allegedly with hernia, but perhaps it was something else. I hated them terribly for this. My mum said that he went to prison as a man but returned completely crushed.”

“Like it was, there was the entrance hall and three rooms. A kitchen, a small room and one more room by the stable. We moved into the latter. I deeply admire my granddad. He started farming at seventy-one. At that time, his farm was in decline and he had to start again so that he could feed us. They had two cows, two goats, they used the milk to feed the pigs. He even had a horse. You realise everything only later, when you get into his years, everything hurts, from seventy-one to seventy-four he had to work like a young man. To plough the land. When sheaves were lighter, oats for instance, I worked alongside my grandad. My grandad loaded the cart, I sorted them out. He was seventy-two, I was twelve. We had a meeting with former schoolmates, they all talked about games they played, in the field and like that, and one of them told me, ‘You know what, I never saw you play.’“

“My dad was on his job, he walked outside to smoke and he saw that crowds of people poured into the square. First he thought that the buses don’t operate and that people walk on foot. Then he learned there was to be a kind of…. well, I wouldn’t call it a demonstration. That there was to be some announcement why the monetary reform happened when a day earlier comrade Zápotocký claimed there would be none. My dad was just curious and went to the square. He waited on the square what would happen, he saw the crowds that went to the Škoda factory. He went along. They sang the national anthem. By the Skoda factory, by the gate, as I understood, my dad was never allowed to talk about it, when he was in prison, but from some documents I understood that a militia man had his gun stuck out of the gate and this angered people. People threw stones. My father was a good-humoured person, so he went up to him, flapped him across the bayonet and told him that he was crazy to provoke those crowds. He got sentenced for six years because of that.”