Karel Přibyl

"So he was riding down the hill, and suddenly some kids—ones who used to go to Czech school with him—started shouting at him. When my father arrived there, even a few German families had declared allegiance to Czechoslovakia, so they let their children attend Czech school. The kids were calling out, ‘Kódl, Karle, Přibyl, stop!’ So my father braked—he was going downhill fast—and if he’d known what was coming, he would’ve kept going and that would’ve been it. But he stopped, and they ran up to him. When they were just a few meters away, they shouted, ‘Another Czech whore.’ They threw him off his bike and punched him in the face. That evening, he didn’t come home—he was twenty-two at the time—and mother said, ‘He’s probably with friends,’ in Hrušovany, a wine-growing region. ‘They probably ended up in a wine cellar somewhere.’ The next day he still wasn’t home, even at lunchtime. So she sent Růžena, the eldest, who had gone to school in Austria and spoke German. She rode down on her bike—she had her own—and ran into an old German woman. She asked, ‘Excuse me, do you know where our Karel might be? He came here yesterday to shop and hasn’t returned.’ The woman looked left and right and said, ‘You know, Rózi, I’ve heard that our youth have been brainwashed by Hitler, and apparently they’ve got some Czechs locked up in a garage behind the savings bank.’ Růžena went there—she spoke German—knocked on the door, and asked, ‘Is our Karel here?’ ‘He is, but we won’t let him go unless you pay a ransom.’ It was illegal, of course, but they could get away with it. So she went off—she knew Hrušovany well—and somewhere bought a ten-liter jug of wine, unofficially. She came back, knocked again, and handed over the wine. They kicked my father out of the garage. He said, ‘They even kicked me in the backside.’ And he said, ‘My bike. They didn’t give me my bike back.’"

I was born on July 17, 1949, because on October 28, 1948—Republic Day—my father marched in a lantern parade wearing his British uniform. The parade started near a school, made a loop, and ended up in the town square. Suddenly, some comrades from the secret police jumped in and grabbed my father—just arrested him and took him away. My mother started looking for him, trying to find out where he was. She went to the local police station and told them that her husband had been taken during the parade, but no one would tell her anything. The rude policemen—State Security—just threw her out and told her to stop bothering them. Some time later, my mother found out she was pregnant. She started seeing a doctor, and only then did the police learn she was expecting. That’s when she was granted permission to visit my father in prison. And that’s how I came to be—because I was already on the way. I was born on July 17, 1949."