The documentaries Children of Stalinism for Czech TV depict the consequences on these children of their parents’ imprisonment. The following is a commentary on two opposing points of view.
Helena Goldstuckerova — Vavrova What is your most pleasant memory from childhood? There are many until they arrested dad. The best one was when he returned home, and we had our first Christmas together. What do you think was the worst moment? The worst was, (long pause) when they imprisoned daddy. I was four and a half and…
I was born into a family that hid in different locations in Slovakia during World War II. My parents succeeded hiding with their little girl thanks to false documents showing they were not Jewish. But in 1943, someone informed on them and they were deported to the Terezienstadt concentration camp. When the war was over, the return home was not a happy one.…
Ivan Margolius On returning to Prague I imagined I had seen my father. His slim figure, elegantly dressed in a dark single-breasted suit, white shirt and blue tie appeared in the distance. He paused at Knihy bookshop in Na Příkopě Street to look inside and check his reflection in the shop window. His hair was swept back, the receding hairline…
Jarmila remembers: “After they arrested our parents, my brother ended up in a children’s institution and I was kidnapped by the security police and placed with a couple somewhere in the mountains. Because they changed my last name. my relatives had a hard time to find me. I didn’t have many relatives; most died during the Holocaust.
I was six years old in 1952 when the secret police arrested my dad. He was supposed to be a witness at the Slansky trial [the accused General Secretary of the Communist Party]. After dad’s arrest, mom injected me with the same stuff that she killed her dad, her sister and then herself. I survived because somebody took me to a children’s hospital. The…
Anna … Born January, 1942 in Oxford, England Lives in Prague After my father’s arrest, we moved out of Prague to live with my grandmother. I was ten and I was the only person my mother could talk to about our situation.
Intorduction The questions posed to me by Jana Svehlova are more applicable to individuals who were much younger than I was when our parents were imprisoned. In the fall of 1949, at the time of my father’s arrest, I was twenty eight. A year later when my mother was arrested, I was twenty nine. Furthermore, I survived with my brother and my mother…
Karel Sling My father was a Jew, a Communist, and he worked as a medic during the Spanish Civil War. My mother is English. She was a member of the British Communist Party and she is an Oxford graduate. They met in England during the war.
