Josef Pavlík

"So I was in a house that maybe didn't have a window. There were no washrooms, they were robbed, like gutter ones. So we ran, one and a half kilometers to the woods in the creek to wash, one and a half kilometers back. So I finally put a blanket in the window. Autumn came, sleeting, and I woke up with a snowdrift on me. I got awful tionsilitis. They took me to Pilsen to the hospital, where I felt like dying for a week. He said, 'Boy, what have you been doing?'

"Simply harassment, restricting walks, holidays. A girl came to visit me after two months. The gatehouse, the gate was like 150 meters from the quarters. The warden came and said I had a visitor at the gatehouse. But the commandant didn't give me permission to go there and shake hands. So she left the packages at the gatehouse and went home."

"We had a staff captain there, I won't name him. His was, 'America, America,' ... he was mispronouncing R..., 'but you'd like to eat Eastern bread, you bunch [of people]. We'll pave the courtyard with your skulls.' Literally. The unimaginable bullying, the atmosphere, you can't tell. A man without price, just an anti-state element. A worthless man who has no claim to anything. He has no chance of getting anywhere because he is politically unreliable, he tends to be Western, which is a harmful element for 'our' party."

"My dad was an administrator of the court, in the morning he assigned work to people - you will work there, you will work there and so on. And my mother worked with the cattle, fed the cows, milked the cows, and did the care and hand washing for four children. There was no washing machine, there was no electricity. The water was in the yard, it had to be pumped there, taken home in buckets, put in pots to heat and for other uses. So no big deal." - "It was a hard life. And you as children, how did you experience your childhood?" - "How did we live it? We lived it in a bunch of kids. We went to school together. When it snowed, they would take us on a sleigh, or they would hitch oxen for the journey, because the horses wouldn't do it, in the high snow, but the oxen, they would pull a roller behind them and roll the road, the snow. There were no ploughs. And the snow was there till May, you know. There were hills, woods, so in the winter, sledding, sleighing. In the summertime, there were fruit trees planted all around, big cherry trees all over those meadows, all kinds of fields. There were apples, everything..."