Naděžda Maňhalová

“And one time I was taking the cards into the card index, and along came Dušek and I never met with him at all, I only knew him from the train station. And he called out: ‘Oh, hey, Naďa, how are you?’ Because they knew that I had been in prison or that I had got a suspended sentence. And I said: ‘Well, how am I, you know well enough.’ And and it’s not quite that I was afraid of him, but I kind of kept my distance. But I didn’t know [it] when I met him on the stairway at the insurance company in Pardubice. And he told me: ‘Well, and who is it who’s hurting you there, or who’s doing it, or how is it?’ And I kind of thought he was a youth unionist, or that he had those kind of tendencies. Because he didn’t behave in any way, and so I told him the names, and the idiot wrote them down and broadcast them on Free Europe.”

“They came for me one day in October in nineteen-fifty-one, I was going to the train and they were waiting for me in front of the insurance building in Pardubice. So off I went, I was there a month, it was rough there, I denied everything, I lost a tooth. And no I kept denying, and they said: ‘You know what? You’ll sit here in the corner.’ They brought Dušek into the interrogation room, head wrapped up, right, and said: ‘And you mustn’t say a word, you have to be quiet and you have to only hear it out.’ So I reckoned to myself, sure. And now Dušek, they asked him whether that Maňhalová, or Hofmanová, how did it happen, that he should repeat it, well, that I had told it to him at the insurance company and so on. And I thought, just you wait, you little bastard. So I said: ‘That ain’t true!’ And at that moment he recognised me. ‘Take him away, take him away.’ Because they were afraid I’d... and then they came up and gave a blow like this. (Q: A woman? A punch?) A punch. Look, it’s not that a piece of my tooth flew out, but my tooth cracked like this, that was such pain when the tooth split apart.”

“And with the one, with Mařenka Hrdá, I went to the same class with her. And the headmaster, Gruber, came and said: ‘Mařenka Hrdá, take all your things and come with me.’ Well, Mařenka knew nothing about it, so she took her things, the teacher looked out of the window and said: ‘Come and have a look, Mařenka.’ Because they were there with the sidecar, you know, they chucked her in, and in the evening Mařenka was...”