“The people who emigrated are in Austria or West Germany, for instance, and this was the Czechoslovak Republic. They knew it, they knew quite a lot. In case of my husband Oldřich Jedlička they knew what was happening, but still, they tortured them again, and they interrogated them and had them beaten in order to learn it from them. But they already knew it. That was atrocious! But how many people were punished for that? Not many, as you know yourself.”
“Even here, he was subjected to strict education in the spirit of Masaryk and the Sokol movement to support the good and punish the evil. There was nothing else. He thus got involved in anti-state activity and he was also a student at the Advanced School for Officers in Hranice na Moravě.”
“When they arrested me, they were taking me to the interrogation room in Bohunice. I was alone in the cell, and some warden mumbled something behind the door. I said: ‘I cannot understand you, I am not used to talking to somebody through a closed door.’ Two of them, two male or two female wardens, were thus allowed to open the door of the cell. When I was being taken to the place for interrogation, I thought to myself: ‘I will not dance to your tune, I will bear the consequences.’ They did not address you as ‘convicted’ because you were still under interrogation and you were not convicted yet, but they addressed you by name. ‘Mrs. Horáčková,’ that was my surname then, ‘haven’t you had some injury or something?’ They could not understand that I behaved normally and that I did not make a scene or cry there.”
Květoslava Jedličková, née Petrásková, was born on May 12, 1929 in Brno. Her parents soon divorced, but her father started a second family in České Budějovice and her mother married a man who was a German national. They entrusted the care for Květoslava to her grandmother in Brno. Květoslava’s father died in Terezín at the end of the war and her mother committed suicide in May 1945. When she was twenty years old, Květoslava married Felix Horáček. In 1948 she became an owner of a shop with perfumes and costume jewellery, but her shop was expropriated by the state soon after. She stayed working there as the shop’s manager. In 1958 she was arrested together with a larger group of managers of drugstores and perfumeries. They were accused of stealing and cash shortfalls and Květoslava was sentenced to 3,5 years of imprisonment. She served her sentence in Bohunice in Brno and in Želiezovce in Slovakia. After her return from prison she divorced her first husband and later she remarried. Her second husband was Oldřich Jedlička, a former political prisoner. Throughout her life, Květoslava was maintaining contacts with Sokol members, former political prisoners and priests who were imprisoned. She was active in the Brno chapter of the organization of former political prisoners K 231 and on behalf of this organization she was lecturing at elementary and secondary schools as well as for the general public.
