"A policeman, not a State Security man, but a policeman, killed my daughter with his car as she was crossing the street. At that time, the lights were turned off because there was no electricity, [my daughter] was in a dark dress and the car just hit her, the car was being driven by a policeman. So I think they would have given them a break then. But again, it wasn't that easy because there were a lot of young people at the funeral. Because every secondary school kid has some friends around them and those people came to the funeral, those 19-year-old girls. The communists saw it as a kind of Christian demonstration." - "That's terrible. When did that happen?" - It was in 1989, or it wasn't, I'm saying that wrong. That was earlier, the kids were born 1960, so she was nineteen, well, 1979. And on the basis that they announced it, that we did a Christian rally... There were also a bit more priests who came, normally they serve twelve when someone like this is buried, and so there were more priests. My wife paid for that by not being allowed to work anywhere."
"About that, about my contact with the police, with the state police - I was called twice. When I was a medicine student, they pulled me out, took me to the embankment in Pilsen and definitely wanted me to sign a cooperation. I was like, no way, no way, I even uttered such a bold sentence that I didn't want to make my life a bad detective story. And they let me go. And then they harassed me once more as a doctor in České Budějovice, where we had already moved with my new family. And then it came... Back at secondary school, in that first encounter with the communist police. It could have been, I graduated [in] 1952, so let's say sometime in [1953] or even longer. That was actually the revolution in Hungary and I wrote something stupid in a letter." - "That was in the fifty-sixth year." - "Yeah, so it was the fifty-sixth year when I was called to these cops. And then they gave me a break. But I know someone from the village, from Draženov, sent a slander against our dad, that we were such a bad family."
"And the Americans liberated us. So, of course, it was fought on the border in the forests of the Bohemian Forest, but then the tanks came to us and we didn't see any clash between the Germans and the Americans. I admired the American army, I met the first black man in my life. They were very nice to us, they drove us in jeeps around the Domažlice square and gave us chewing gum and those tins from UNRRA. And it was compared to the German army, which was already really starving, so they were the idea of abundance for us."
"Initially, when I found out at my graduation - and that graduation was terribly strange - I had straight A's in those four subjects. So I was very surprised that suddenly a member of the Communist Party, unknown to us, came to the matriculation committee that evaluated our performance at the matriculation. We did not know him at all. Moreover, he messed with us there. So whoever wanted to study chemistry, for example, was sent to a technical field, and technology, on the other hand, was decided to study anything in the field of natural sciences. And I thought I could study literature, and was sent to the medical faculty in Pilsen instead."
"For example, when I wanted to move, already as a doctor, from one region to another, it was arranged like this - piece by piece. This means that one had to negotiate with someone who wanted to move from the South Bohemian Region to the Pilsen Region and vice versa. So, when I managed to find a doctor who was interested in the transition, they allowed us to make the exchange - piece by piece - to take place. So we were a kind of a managed commodity, you could say."
"However, we experienced liberation by the American army a little earlier than, for example, the Red Army reached Prague in May 1945. It was a very pleasant meeting, because the American soldiers were well equipped and materially supplied. They gave the children chewing gums, all kinds of canned goods, and chocolate from their stocks and drove us up on jeeps. And there I saw a black man for the first time when I was 10 years old in 1945 on the Domažlice square... Moreover, it was such a nice army. The nice thing about it was that it left the republic in time and didn't stay here as an occupying army."
Slavoj Brichcín was born on 7 February 1935 in the village of Čermná in Domažlice. As a child from a family of teachers, he started going to school at the age of five. After primary school he studied at the grammar school, which he graduated from at the age of 17. Instead of his dreamed Faculty of Arts, he headed for medical school in Pilsen. Under the influence of his brother, a clinical psychologist, he decided to specialise in psychiatry. During his studies, and later during his employment, State Security (StB) contacted him several times to persuade him to cooperate, which he refused. Professionally, he worked first in the largest country hospital in Dobřany, then in České Budějovice and Prague. He contributed significantly to the development of the field of sexology. At the end of the 1980s he became the head of the Psychiatric Hospital in Bohnice, where he initiated the Bohnice Sexology Days conference. In 2024 he was living in Prague.
