Jarmila Bílková

* 1936

  • "No one has let us know anything. I don't know how my father behaved in that prison, but when he came in he was nothing but skin and bones. He weighed 54 kilos, what's that for a man? He only came as he had been dressed. All he had in his pocket was a ticket, a handkerchief and nothing else. Not a crown to buy water or anything, nothing at all. He came in his prison uniform, it was some kind of rags. And heavy boots, full rubber lace-up boots. That's what he was wearing when he came. No socks, maybe no underwear, I don't know. But everything he was wearing had to be returned by post, it was just borrowed for the journey. We had to send everything to Leopoldov. And he had nothing at home, because everything that was his was taken [by State Security]. And we didn't buy men's clothes. So I don't even know where my mum got him something without measuring him and picking out clothes for him, I don't know how it was there."

  • "We were there early in the morning because it was set for the morning. We went at night and slept at the station. We came to Leopoldov and the village was in a field. There was nothing completed there, as the town of Leopoldov ended, there was a cornfield and as it was getting light the outline of the prison just stood out. It was horrible that it was so suggestive - black. You couldn't see that it was these great mounds, these protective walls. It was black and there were guard booths on top of the galleries. There was somebody standing there with a gun. It was horrible. We walked there, there was a well-trodden path and we had to wait our turn to go. A little door opened and when you walked into that corridor, it was dark, and we said, well, what is it? Are we going to the basement or where are we going? There was one light bulb swinging on a wire, flickering. Then, when you looked around, they sent us a little further down to the underpass. There were four or five steps and a door. We stepped into a room there, and it was kind of half-light, too. We were bigger girls now, so we could see our father. There was a counter, bars, nothing, more bars, and only behind the next bars was my father. So we could only talk from a distance."

  • "As they were bringing in the prisoners, it just got noisy. It was human wreckage, with clothes hanging on them - sunken faces, impoverished, hunched over. Some were walking with sticks and couldn't even walk. Mr Hrabalík, who was sentenced with my father, was walking on crutches, barely able to move. So they sat them down there and now they were talking about their offences. And as they named them, we were crying, lamenting, wailing. Some of us called out to their parents or to the prisoners, and the judge was just banging his gavel on the counter and said: There'll be quiet or we'll clear the courtroom. Everybody got quiet, and what was inside you, you had to muffle it because it was unbelievable. Otherwise you'd be screaming, you'd lose your voice. When one wassentenced to 15 years, the other to 12 years. And what for? I just remember that when my father was standing and they were saying this about him, this offence of his, he just did this - he was signalling that it wasn't true, what we were hearing. That's what I remember."

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    Zlín, 01.08.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:10:17
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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My father came back toothless and grey-haired. He looked like he‘d been released to die

Jarmila Bílková in 2023
Jarmila Bílková in 2023
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jarmila Bílková was born on 19 November 1936 to Jarmila and Bedřich Koller in Uherský Brod. From her childhood years she remembers the deportation of the Jewish inhabitants, the bombing and the subsequent liberation of her hometown. The family subscribed to Sokol ideals, his father was a member of the National Socialist Party. On 2 August 1951, State Securirty officers came to her father‘s home and a trial followed. In a pre-staged trial with the alleged anti-state group Včela (A Bee), the father was sentenced to 15 years in prison for treason. He went through several prisons, serving the longest part of his sentence in Leopoldov. Witness´s mother Jarmila was left alone with her three daughters - no one wanted to employ her, her daughters could not get an education. After the renewal of the trial in the second half of the 1950s, her father was released from prison, returned home with poor health and spent some time in the hospital in Uherské Hradiště. Neither of her parents lived to see the fall of totalitarianism. Jarmila Bílková worked in various manual jobs until her retirement. In 2023 she was living in her native Uherský Brod.