Ladislav Otruba

"He was released on amnesty in 1965. But his health was ruined and we had no money. Nobody would employ my mother. It was difficult. We could hardly afford food because there was no one to support us. My grandparents had 300 crowns of pension, so their sons supported them. For example, I didn't have shoes in the winter and walked in sneakers, or if there was snow, I used to wear galoshes and buckle slippers. Everybody made fun of me. My brother hated it; it didn't bother me. I have to tell you this. A gentleman died in our house, former prosecutor Dr. Duža, and his wife came to us and said: 'I have a basket full of Zdenek's beautiful trousers, shirts and shoes.' She brought us two baskets of clothes. My mother made them to fit me and I started wearing them. White trousers, leather boots, kind of plaited, and shirts. So I was looking cool, everybody was looking at me, but my brother didn't want to wear it; he found it stupid. White trousers, white shirts - you didn't wear that, you wore sweatpants. I went to play football and I came in wearing that. We had a lot of those clothes."

"We had crazy problems with faith. My father was actually arrested because of it. Sometime in 1960 or 1961 there was a communist congress and they made a commitment that there would be no churchwardens, altar boys or organists in our church. My sister started playing the organ when she was in the seventh grade, even though they forbade it. My brother and I were ten years old and we were churchwardens, so they failed. They wanted no classes on religion, but my mom worked around those people and even more signed up, so of course the woman who was the secretary - she only had completed five grades by the way, and was primitive and stupid - was completely over it. So there was an effort to shut my father up. In the end he was more or less locked up because of religion. They wanted to get rid of us before, so they offered my father a job as a stone mason plant in Mikulovice near Jeseník. We were supposed to get a green house with a view of the mountains, it was wonderful. I still remember it. We came back and my mother said, 'I'm not going anywhere, I'm not going to be blackmailed.' So they sought a reason to imprison dad. They were wondering what they should arrest him for. When women went to the beet field, he would sharpen their hoes, so they left him some a pack of cigarettes. They couldn't arrest him for that. Or he got five kilos of cement for someone, but that was not enough to lock him up either. Then they found a rock that was not recorded, but that was not enough. They finally arrested him because of two big rocks of Swedish granite in front of his house that he allegedly did not post in records. They were out by the road and people would walk around them. So they arrested him for that."