Marie Dáňová

"I remembered that when they threshed the crops, it was supervised by the Czechoslovak Youth Union. A Union man lay behind the barn and kept track of the number of sacks of threshed grain on a sheet of paper laid out on the engine. The sheet got lost. He immediately ran to the Mejzlik family's tavern, where there was the only phone booth in the village. He called the StB and they arrived in their leather coats. They wanted to know what had happened and claimed that it was sabotage, that Daddy had destroyed the sheet. Then they found it, but in the meantime they had searched the whole house - and what exactly they were looking for, I really don't know."

"The trouble started after we moved to Chyška. School headmaster Mr Mráček asked me whether Nejedlý [Zdeněk Nejedlý, the Minister of Education at the time] was my relative. He wasn't. I said no. Then it started. He terrorized me for not knowing the numerical sequence. We were behind the schedule in school in Horní Radslavice. He would poke me in the ribs with a pointer and hurl an eraser at me because I didn't know the sequence. He made it very clear that I was the daughter of a kulak. I have to say, though, that it wasn't the same a year later. He didn't hate me. He worked as an accountant at the national committee and he would send me on errands later on. I would collect fees for him and so on, and he sort of forgot that I was a kulak's daughter."