Viktor Kopačka

"At that time, one did a postgraduate degree, then one got a CSc. degree in one's name, which is like a PhD or something like that today. So this degree after the name and it was actually some kind of doctoral studies at that time. The former head of the breeding station said I should do that. But the problem was that I wasn't in the Communist Party and that would have been possible. Maybe if I'd done the VUML. That was the Evening University of Marxism-Leninism, that was for some workers, where they taught them the politics, maybe they would have taken me on. So I said, 'All right, I'll apply to VUML.' And at that time I had a friend who, when I was studying at that university in Budejovice, I gave him various notes. In those days you couldn't copy it like today, in those days you had to either write it down or somebody somewhere borrowed the notes so that you could study it. He was the director of the political school in Klatovy. Today, of course, there are no political schools. And I was at the entrance examination in Sušice for the VUML, and they said, 'Please, if you don't receive the letter by the end of August that you've been accepted, it's some kind of mistake.' And I didn't get anything by the end of August. So I said to this friend, 'Hey, I didn't get anything, so should I go or should I not go? I don't know.' And he says, 'It'll come to you.' And then I got the call that I wasn't accepted because of too many applicants. So I thought, I've taken this action where I actually, I'll say, didn't like it. And yet I ended up not being accepted when they took basically everybody. They were still persuading them to go. So that was also kind of an experience that related to my father being locked up."

"There was very little that could be written from that prison, because they would check it, and if he wrote something they wouldn't approve, they simply wouldn't allow it to be sent. So here's a letter, for example, there's a prison institute written there. He actually wrote in there, basically I'm not going to read it, that there was a lot of work, but that he would rather work at home, how they were at home and so on. And so he was trying to work a lot, I guess, because he was sending money home for them to have money. It even says here that he bought some watches for the girls and such, that he was trying to make as much money as he could. He actually had to pay for his stay in prison with what he made there. That was deducted and then he could send some money home to his family if he earned more. So he was sending money home to his family. But it was certainly very hard in Jáchymov, and as a result of - of course it's hard to put it like that, if that's what it was, my father died at 72 of cancer. So it could have been also a consequence of the fact that he worked in the uranium mines."