Tomáš Sousedík

“I’ve thought about it a lot and talked with a number of people from those times, from both sides of the barricades, so to say. At least, with those who would allow for an actual discussion. And I think that because my father was so dominant in the resistance in Moravian Wallachia and that everyone who meant anything and were willing to do something for it were in his group, which was connected both to London and to Moscow via a partisan group led by the Soviet partisan Major Murin, so they didn’t have an adequate Communist figure, whom they could prioritise and claim he was the one. So they at least needed to destroy the person who towered so dominantly over the rest. I have this one funny anecdote, which happened to me: when we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of my father’s birth in 1994, this one former comrade, who had come to his senses in sixty-eight, sidled up to me and said: ‘I’m surprised, seeing that he was from such a poor background, that we didn’t take him for our own, like Fučík, and at least we wouldn’t have had to make anything up, unlike Fučík.’ So I thought it quite laughable, but I told him they had done well not to appropriate him.”

“Normal logistics companies refused, so they had to call in the People’s Militia, State Security, the National Security Corps [the police - trans.], they loaded us into lorries, stole everything they could, and moved us into a block of flats. Well, and I had a breed of pigeons at the time, and I quite naively packed up the pigeons, took them off their eggs, put them in margarine boxes, and in the block of flats in the evening, I put them into the bathtub, when it was empty, of course. And I had no idea - being ten years old - what would happen the next day or what I’d do about it. And when I looked out from the balcony in the morning, I saw my dovecote standing on the pavement in the public area behind the block of flats, which would have caused a terrible furore nowadays. But that wasn’t because the stetsecs were so kind-hearted that they wanted to do something nice for me. It had just got in the way in the stolen villa. So they stuck it out there. And I continued to keep my pigeons there - even when I was studying at university in Prague, the pigeons were still flying around there. They were fed by people who lived nearby, no one cared for them any more, but they were still there.”

“I studied in the years 1962-1967, and as a football player for Sparta I had a scholarship from ČKD. So I then had to enter that bastion of extreme left-wing Bolsheviks. I worked as head of operational planning for spare parts for trams, both in Prague and those that were exported, say, to Cairoor Tbilisi. And I actually experienced an illegal congress of the Party there, I observed it from the window across the street, through the trams, and in the night the participants of this illegal and legendary Party congress slept on our work desks in sleeping bags. Of course, like most of the rank-and-file employees at ČKD, we were on Dubček’s side, which the comrades in the Party committees in the factory regarded as an attack on Socialism, so they then made life as difficult as possible for us during the normalisation. So it was clear to me that I couldn’t stay there.”