Ivana Bočková

"Well, they [State Security officers] came, they allegedly found a machine gun, which I'm sure there was nothing like that. And my mom and my aunt and my grandfather decided they didn't want to live in this case - my dad locked up, accused. Probably morphine and strychnine Mom injected everybody with. The State Security officers were there at the time, so she left in their presence, saying that she had to take care of the baby, and that's probably when this happened. So the only one who saved me was Dr. Bradáč in the Liberec hospital."

"On September 14, 1952, they invited him [my father] to explain something and he never came back, and then, from what I read in the documents, he came back on October 1 with the State Securit zand allegedly found a machine gun on the roof, in the attic. That was the excuse that he was arrested, that he had stolen some gold and embezzled some things in the Chronor, which of course was not true. Well, and then they got him to confess to his association with the [Secret] Intelligence Service and so on."

“I started attending the first grade, but the StB State Security did a house search in our home two weeks later. At first they led away dad, he was summoned to give some explanation, but basically he has not come back. In 1952 a tragedy occurred in Liberec when the StB entered our house. My mom was suffering from quite serious mental and psychic issues, and she was undergoing treatment for that. And my grandpa Antonín Strejček and aunt Marie Jurková were living with us together in that house and they all committed suicide. They took me with them. Then they took me to hospital and I was the only one whom they saved.”

“Something that surprises me greatly: my mom had been expelled from the Communist Party. They [she and father] were both prewar members of the Party. One of them was a member since 1931, the other since 1933. And in spite of all these insane experiences, when both of them were expelled, and their member’s cards had been returned to them after I don’t know how many years… After her death, they expelled my mother from the Party, and all the time he has been trying to annul the decision, and to make them revoke their annulment of her membership. I am absolutely not able to grasp this. If they do something to me, the Party does something to me, and in spite of that, he was even still trying to get back into the Party. I am absolutely not able to understand this. They had to have this insanely great conviction that the Party was a wonderful thing.”

“My dad has saved himself, being a Jew and a communist, and he was dispatched, so at first he went to Italy, and from Italy to France, and via Portugal he reached England. He thus spent the war in England and thus he saved his life. My mother was a Catholic and so she did not have this problem. I think that she served in Tábor and later in Benešov, as a doctor, as far as I know. And that’s probably where her psychic problems developed. She suffered from serious insomnia and she underwent treatment and she was sinking into depression as a result of it, and what probably triggered it was that in Benešov she was treating women who had been raped by Russian soldiers. She was a Communist, and it was probably very hard for her to bear it, and this was probably one of the causes of her illness.”