Karel Šírek

“When State Security started coming there, they let it be anyway. They’d take me from work, for instance. I would come to work in the morning, and they’d call me into his office, which looked similar. There were two blokes sitting by the side there, and he said: ‘These comrades here,’ he spoke with me informally, ‘they’ve come for you, Karel, they want to ask you something.’ So we sat there for half an hour, the comrades didn’t say anything, then they said they’d take me away. I said we were leaving for Slovakia at ten. They said: ‘We’ll see about that.’ They released me at eight in the evening, so no I didn’t. And when I came to work the next day, he asked me what had happened. I just told him he probably wouldn’t understand it and that it was better that way, and he let it be again.”

“I was there as a witness, but they didn’t even tell me that, they didn’t tell me that till afterwards because if charges were brought against someone, they usually ended up convicted. But they didn’t tell me that, they said that they had a request for custody there, and I didn’t if they did or didn’t, so it was just a game. They told several times they had the request, they even showed it to me, saying it was a custody request and that it was only up to me if they’d sign now or a bit later, that they were searching my house that very minute. They weren’t, but they did search my friend’s house, and they confiscated absolutely everything, and I didn’t see him again until eighteen months later, and in the statement he read all the people who had testified. You didn’t know [if it was true - trans.] while they were holding you there.”