After her release, she had to report to the police every week for six years
Download image
Anna Mužíková, née Seborská, was born on 11 May 1932 in Prague. Her father Karel and mother Marie worked for the railway during the First Republic. Her father came from Vienna. During the war he was threatened with the possibility of having to enlist in the Wehrmacht. However, he pretended to have mental problems and ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Bohnice. For the rest of the war he worked in a hotel in Leipzig. Anna did not have any siblings, and what she remembers from the war years is the oppressive atmosphere of the period following the assassination of Heydrich in Prague and her stay with her grandmother in Sušice, where she experienced the liberation by the Americans. After graduating from the municipal school in 1947, she began to train as a shop assistant. However, she did not finish her apprenticeship because she was arrested by State Security on 17 January 1950 when she was still a minor. The reason was preparation and incitement to flee to the West. Anna Mužíková, together with her friend Maria Vítková, was in contact with two young men who had succeeded in emigrating and, according to State Security, with other people who intended to follow them. The interrogations took place at Pankrác, and after one twelve-hour interrogation Anna Mužíková was brought to her cell unconscious. The public trial took place at the State Court in Prague on 9 May 1950. Anna walked away from it with a sentence of 12 years in prison for aiding and abetting illegal border crossing. After the sentence was pronounced, the members of the Youth Union present in the courtroom chanted, “Add another twelve!” Mužíková passed through prisons in Hradec Králové, where she plucked feathers, in Lnáře, where she worked in a laundry, and finally the Correctional Institute for Juveniles in Zámrsk, where she performed work in a greenhouse. In Hradec Králové and Lnáře she experienced reduced food rations for not fulfilling the standard, beatings, three times she got scabies, and had to be transferred to the prison hospital in Pankrác due to neglected treatment of the infection. She also suffered from frequent heart arrhythmias. After three years of imprisonment, she was released on 23 December 1953. For six years she had to report to the National Security Corps office every week, she was not allowed to leave Prague and was given a choice of two jobs: a pig feeder or the manufacture of safety pins in the Koh-i-noor factory. She got married, but her first husband soon died. The second husband, a former emigrant, Karel Mužík, returned from France after an amnesty from the President of the Republic. After their marriage, they moved to Sušice, where Anna worked in a garden centre and then in the Solo matches factory. In 1990, the Regional Court in Pilsen fully rehabilitated Anna Mužíková.
