Olga Bezděková

“My parents were assigned a flat in Vinohrady, where other pilots lived as well. One of our neighbours in the house was Novotný, one Prchal, who later legged it - I used to play with his daughter Kejka. Later, I found their door sealed off. I was going home one day, and I said: ‘Dad, there’s formalin on the door where Kejka lives.’ And Dad just said hm. They’d escaped, successfully, and Dad was just wondering when his turn would come. One Fajtl lived next door, they arrested him there, didn’t tell his wife, she looked for him in prisons all over the place, dreadful. And round the corner was Mr Šimon’s flat, another pilot, and his wife later told me in 1990 that his husband had received warning that State Security was after him, so he fled from his house. He ran from Vinohrady all the way to Celetná Street, they shot him there, took the keys to his flat, went there, opened it - his wife was there with a baby in a cot, and they aimed a pistol at the baby. She asked: ‘Where’s my husband?’ She didn’t know that she was already a widow.”

“I have one more memory from Vinohrady. Dad used to go to the Evangelical church in Korunní Street, and always when he came out, he’d go for a walk with his friend Jura, and they’d also talk about politics. And back in that year fifty-something, Dad had an agent trailing him. Dad said ‘Jura, whenever he comes close, we’ll talk about herbs. Well, but Dad was a great story-teller, so one time he’d had enough, so he turned round and said: ‘Jura, look.’ And he smacked [the agent] from one side and the other and said: ‘Now go and report what we did.’ He didn’t report it, because the subject had smacked him. I didn’t found out about that until 1990.”