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.
When Mrs. M. mentions that she is nervous about the interview, I tell her that I share her feelings because she is the first of the respondents I am interviewing. I suggest starting with her childhood memories. It is now 10 a.m. Her father was arrested when she was four. She admits not remembering the time surrounding his arrest, only,…
Miss. S. leaves the room and comes back with her younger sister Mrs. J. The three of us chitchat for a few moments. I reassure them what matters are their individual views on the events, rather than whether their stories match. The older sister leaves the room and the younger sister and I sit at the opposite sides…
Looking for Miss S’s home with a pharmacy sign among the two storied houses painted with pastel colors makes me feel as if I am transferred to a world that I only read about in old Czech novels. I am imagining her father opening his pharmacy’s door in the mornings many years ago. Then most of the town people, that passed his house,…
