Dagmar Jungmannová

"My dad worked at the ministry. One day, he came to the office and found an application for the Communist Party on his desk. General Svoboda was the Minister of Defence at the time; they knew each other from Russia. Dad called him and asked him what to do; he wasn't signing it under any circumstances. General Svoboda advised him to apply for retirement. So dad did - he was old enough, he was past 50. But... he got his pension, it was granted, but then he was branded an enemy of the people and it was withdrawn. Brother Karel contributed to that by being abroad. We knew nothing anything about him but nobody believed us. We only heard from him when dad was in hospital in Motol. Before he died, Karel found out from a friend, I guess; I don't know."

"When my mother saw the film [Assassination] about our paratroopers on TV, it gave her a nervous attack. She realized she knew all those guys. She said it was terrible. She used to get food for them; she went to Moravia to farm people she knew and used to go to them for eggs, meat and butter. She carried it in suitcases, which wasn't very safe. They caught her in Brno once and took her to Špilberk where she spent about a week there in the company of Germans. When she came back she had like four teeth knocked out."

"The flat in the castle, those were unheated rat holes. We only heated one room because we wouldn’t have been able to heat both rooms and buy coal. Just in the winter, we burned sixty quintals of nut coal and thirty quintals of briquettes in just one room. And we even went to my grandmother’s in Prague for Christmas. The day before Christmas Eve, my mom packed the coal. We arrived after three days, and we had frost on the walls and water in a bucket frozen to the bottom. It was a horrible apartment. We had to carry water from the square because it wasn’t supplied there. We carried coal up from the cellar, that also gave dad some extra work."

"I remember him as more of a person who loved animals and I never heard him complain about anything in his life. He was an awfully nice guy. He would come into the woods with me in the winter, teach me how to ski and skate. He'd walk in the woods with me, teach me to spot animal tracks. Or we'd go skiing. There was a little hill near the forest, so he showed me where to go. And at the edge of the woods, he'd build a fire and I'd ride down the hill and pedal up. And he'd toast me bread, spread it with goose fat, and I can smell it when I think of it. Those were great memories. Or in the summer we used to go swimming for a whole day, he had a car - a Minora two, so we used to go to Klimětice, where there was a beautiful pond. There he taught me to swim again."

"My brother said he was going to Horažďovice to visit mother for the holidays and he and a friend had escaped through Germany. In the refugee camp they got an application form, got to New Zealand and got married there. He married a Czech girl. They moved to Australia, but we didn't know about him at all. Of course, that didn't help my dad either. First he was in detention because of General Píka and then again because of his brother. Eventually, his pension was confiscated by order of General Čepička, and we were evicted. It was his chauffeur, Janota, who invited him to live in a castle in Kosova Hora. Fortunately, there was a good doctor there, because dad was going to work in the mines in Jáchymov. Dr. Kott and Chief Kareš from Sedlčany from the internal medicine wrote him a recommendation that he was not healthy and he was going to work only for the state farms. First he rode with oxen and then with horses."

"When he died, my mother wasn't even allowed to put his uniform in his coffin. He told my mother in the hospital that he wanted an air force uniform in the coffin, but she had to cut off the gold buttons, the spacers, everything. There wasn't a single gold button at the funeral. There was no one there. They were Kosovars from the tractor faktory. The guys there loved him so much, so there were people from the farm, from the tractor factory, Kosovars, relatives, otherwise everybody was afraid. Even though my mother put an announcement in the newspaper that my father had died and when the funeral would take place."