Jan Hocek

"It ended up in counterintelligence summoning me. There was such a dim light shining on me. There were two of them sitting there, one raising his voice a lot, the other being nice, kind of classic. They yelled at me, 'We know this and that about you, this, this,' I was amazed. They knew what I had said to someone and someone else, what I had said, how I had acted, that I had refused to go to May Day, etc. I burst out laughing when they said to me, 'Now here's a paper and pencil and write it all down, take it back all, your mistakes.' And when I heard 'take it back' I thought of Hus, the council, and I burst out laughing. Well, that's when I got my first punch. So I thought, 'This is going to be pretty harsh,' so I tried some more, like I didn't do anything, so I got a second blow. I sat there thinking, this is already a big fucking mess, not to mention the fact that I was threatened by the Pilsen prosecutor, that was the biggest bastard. Of course, they threatened me that they would send me straight to him, etc. He was really such a bastard, that for the slightest thing, [he would send you to] Sabinov etc. So I started writing. They came after about half an hour, I had something written... They asked if I was finished? 'No, I'm not finished.' 'Would you like a coffee, a cigarette?' and so... They brought me coffee and a cigarette, and at that point, as I was lighting up and sipping the coffee, I was like, 'I can't do this.' So I tore up what I'd written and left it on the table and just smoked and sipped the coffee. They came in another half hour later. When they saw that, I got the third blow and went straight to cell in Klatovy."

"At this time, the State Security men burst in on us. It was so strange, because I think they just wanted to scare him [my father]. He had a deep library, there were three rows of books, and at the very back he had Beneš, Masaryk, Vaculík, Škvorecký, he had the complete Reporter magazines, and at the front we children, or actually mainly me, had books. I had the May books, the Foglar books, the Seton books, the Verne books. They were shouting in a crazy way, they threw out the first row of children's books, they were trampling on them like they were out of their minds. They were screaming all the time, my brother, he was holding my hand and he wetted himself, we were all dumbfounded. My dad knew there was no point doing anything, they got mad and didn't look anywhere else, they didn't even go to the cupboard or anywhere, they just spent their rage on my children's books and got out."