Jana Mičánková

"Then, in 1955, it came to such a situation that one of our neighbours was arrested in the field, we can say his name - a certain Josef Hrazdička, who was convicted and imprisoned in Jáchymov. In the same way, at the beginning of December 1955, Antonín Zlámal, another farmer, was arrested. He also ended up in Jáchymov. These were men ten and I think twelve years older than my father, and they did not survive their imprisonment in Jáchymov. Mr. Zlámal died after about three quarters of a year. And it happened that there was the bigger building and the state farm at that time had set up a pig farm there for fattening pigs, and at that time my mother had a job there, and one day this Mrs. Zlámalová said to her, 'Imagine that I received a letter telling me that my husband had died and had been cremated somewhere in the local crematorium, and if I wanted his ashes I had to pay, I don't remember what amount. Well, that speaks volumes about the behaviour towards the survivors of prisoners. Mr. Kvasnička, he got sick there, he got cancer, and it was a little over a year when his condition was so hopeless that he was released from prison and allegedly taken back to his family in Rataje. But someone at the National Committee said that his return to Rataje was undesirable, so they left him in the hospital in Kroměříž, where he died the next day or the next but one day."

"My mother was also interrogated, once overnight, and she was brought in the next morning. As we know from various other cases, these prisoners then often confessed to things that were not true, so we didn't have the opportunity to meet my dad at the time of the remand, only in writing, and I think that the number of letters was also limited at that time. The first time we saw him, my mother and we two daughters, was after the trial in Uherské Hradiště. It was also quite shocking at the time, because there was a wall with only a small barred window, and we couldn't even shake hands. So that's what we endured there."