Kateřina Zukalová

“It was resistance against the regime as such. Americans, they were simply a symbol. There were also several graves of fallen U.S. pilots in Moravia. If I should give reasons for my sentiments, it’s that it has always been important to us in Lipník nad Bečvou because Martin Zeberský, a U.S. pilot, would have crashed into the city had he ejected. But he stayed in the plane and died. He has a grave or this memorial in the cemetery in Lipník and us people from Lipník, even as kids when we were going to our grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ graves, we would always go light a candle at Martin’s grave. Up to now, whenever I go there with my children, it’s unthinkable not to go to his grave too. He was a hero or at least he was to us when we were kids, he was the hero we could identify with. We were liberated by the Soviet Union but that was forced on us whereas he was a hero we chose. So in short, it was about this too – identifying with America.”

“When dad needed to get home from work without getting arrested, I’d wait by the gate of the company he worked in with my stroller. And before the police turned around, I shoved him the stroller and ran away. And they really never did it – to leave a stroller standing on the road and arrest him. My son was kind of a human shield and they couldn’t do anything about it. We used him like this a couple of times. My son was a warrior back then already.”

“I was on my way to school, he needed to go to Prague, so we were standing on the train station in Lipník together. Two officers approached him, both uniformed. It was these patrolmen that we had known. One of them even lived in a street right next to ours. They were unhappy to do such a job but what could they do… And they wanted my dad to come with them, to arrest him. And he had had this phase of passive resistance. He just lay on the floor and said he wouldn’t go anywhere. They of course couldn’t lift him up, so they had to call for reinforcements. It was funny on one hand but on the other hand it wasn’t very pleasant to see your father lying on the ground and the fathers of your classmates all helpless. What should they do with engineer Hradílek, lying on the floor like this… When I tell my kids about these kinds of situations, they don’t believe me.”