Blanka Čílová

"His back was so badly cut that he didn't want our children to go into the bathroom while he was there. His back was visibly cut with a wire baton. He had it for the rest of his life. From then on he never went to the pond or swimming pool to bathe. He never took his shirt off in front of anyone again."

"My husband was on Letná Plain for a whole week. He came back with a huge flags. Everything we had saved for the roof, which we wanted to repair because it was leaking, he took it all and distributed it to the students at the faculties. He was staying in Prague with his cousin, Dr. Oldřich Fejfar, an associate professor who was interested in dinosaurs. He came back to me four days later in such a state that for two days he was not able to get back to reality at all. He was in complete euphoria. He enjoyed November 1989 the most beautifully of all."

“He was always very active in getting involved in everything. I think that he was even taking shifts for some of the other boys there. The hardest work in the front, the drilling. It was very tough work he had to do in Jáchymov. He was physically very fit.”

“He spoke to her. They weren’t allowed to hold hands. So he would speak to her and after a while she told me: ‘mummy, who’s this man? That’s not my daddy’. But I told her: ‘Blanička, this is your daddy. He’s changed a bit. He had to work very hard now so please don’t look at him this way’. She said: ‘daddy, please come back. I wish you were just the same as you used to be. Just come back home’.”

“An old, first-republic police man stayed in the kitchen. He told me to go and make myself some coffee or whatever I needed, to hang the diapers. As he fell asleep on that kitchen table I took the gun and carried it away together with the diapers. I somehow thought to myself that I just couldn’t leave it laying there on the table for them to find it. Because they hadn’t searched it there, yet. They were waiting mainly for him.”