Božena Křivková, roz. Zajíčková

“The times were very harsh. My brother still kept his trade licence and he ran a pub, but suddenly he received an order that he was to go to work in a factory. It was called organized recruitment. He could choose between two options: mines or a silk factory. Work in the silk factory involved quite a lot of health risks, all chemical processes were being done without any protective measures and the production was still quite primitive at that time. After about half a year of working there my brother began to suffer from a serious case of conjunctivitis, but he recovered from it. There was another man who worked there who had also been a sole trader – he had a chemist’s shop in Libochovice, and he and my brother became friends. Somebody posted a pamphlet on the gate at that time, but it was a provocation. Workers realized that their extra pay for work on Sundays and Saturdays had been cancelled, and therefore they wrote a petition that the factory return this bonus to them. They came to my brother and to the other sole trader as well and asked him to sign it. My brother signed the petition and he even advised them that the petition ought to be written by somebody who was from a working class so that they would not have troubles. But it was of no use. When the petition reached the district authority and the regional authority and so on, all of a sudden a State Security car from Prague arrived there and policemen jumped out and surrounded the whole building just because of this petition. They interrogated my brother and the sole trader, too ; they interrogated him first. They took my brother to an attic room, where there were three large vats with lye. If they threw somebody into the third vat he would dissolve there. This would not happen in the first vat, but they didn’t know it. About two days later dad went there to ask them what was wrong because my brother had not arrived home. They told him: ‘The police is there, we don’t know anything.’ Dad thus didn’t learn anything and he returned home. We were scared. And on the third day they came and informed us that they found his body in the vat. But since they threw him into the first vat, because they did not know the process, the body obviously did not dissolve. I said: ‘For Christ’s sake, it had to be terrible when they threw him in there.’ On the day of the funeral, gravediggers brought the coffin to our gate, but when I saw that my mom was collapsing, I quickly ran out and asked them: ‘Please, take him straight to the church, there was a Roman Catholic Church on the opposite side, we will have the obsequies there and then we will take him to the cemetery.’ One of the gravediggers then told me that my brother had a large wound on his head. Nobody else said that he had anything like that. That was the only information we had. I thus thought that they probably shot him and then threw him into the vat with lye. Or they hit him… we don’t know what had happened.”

“Since my husband was receiving only a minimum wage, I wanted to go to work so that we could feed our children. I thought that I would work in my profession and become a kindergarten teacher. A neighbour, who was a principal of a kindergarten, even came to me and she told me to write my application letter immediately because they needed help. I submitted my application and nothing happened. I thus asked what was wrong and she told me: ‘Don’t you know what happened?’ I replied: ‘No, I don’t.’ The chairman of the education department (that was his official title at that time) allegedly told her that I would not be allowed to work as a teacher since I was married to a priest.”

“The atmosphere was already somewhat more relaxed at that time… I wrote an article to our magazine Voice of the Orthodox Church, which was being published by our church. I wrote an article about religious education of children. They immediately published it. However, I don’t know how, but the article meanwhile somehow got to the regional secretary. At first he spoke to my husband and he asked him: ‘Did your wife write this?’ He replied: ‘Yes, she did.’ My name was under the article. They requested it. I got into great trouble because of that. A regular inspector came to my class at first, and she spent half a day with me in order to see how I worked with children. Then she went through my lesson preparations and plans – we had to have yearly plans. She was checking if there was some deviation in there – something about religious education. But she didn’t find anything and she left quite contented. But it was not enough. A regional inspector came after her and it was the same all over again. At first she was with me, then with the children, she was looking at my plans and preparations, and that was it. About a month or two months later the chairman of the education department called me – a different one than who had spoken to my husband – and he told me something like this: I was not allowed to express myself in the public on matters of religion and writing articles was indeed a public affair, and I was forbidden to do it. He told me that they were satisfied with my work and that my work was in order, but that if I was to do it again and keep writing for the Voice of the Orthodox Church, they would have to part with me. The matter was concluded by that.”

“Everything changed in 1948. When collectivisation started, my father did not want to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative at any cost. He was a stubborn and uncompromising man. Joining the cooperative was supposed to be voluntary, but in reality it was forced and my father did not join. Great persecution started. At first they persecuted my father by summoning him to come to Lovosice for interrogations all the time. Then they prescribed delivery quotas for him which he was unable to meet. It was not possible to obtain any farmhands. He had to do everything either by himself, or with mom, or we were helping a little when we were on vacation.”

“I was still attending the course which would qualify me to work in the spa resort when they came for him. It was in the 1950s and he spent an awfully long time there. They had a special room upstairs in the police station building in Cheb and they tortured him over and over again. It was not physical torture, but it was a terrible psychic terror. They did not use physical brutality, because they had been probably penalized for what they had done to my brother whom they had treated cruelly, and my husband would always remind them of that while he was there, too. He was a soldier. At the beginning he was very brave and relentless. When he knew that he would go to the police station he would always grab the cookies which I had prepared on the table, and when they interrogated him he would deliberately eat them there. It was his way of slight provocation.”