Radslav Švéda

* 1949

  • “Grandpa was locked up, Mum was locked up, two of my uncles were locked up. So we trundled from one prison to the next every three months. It was stressful, when you’re six years old and you’re crammed in an express so full of people that you have to stand on one foot, and you’re still sleepy. You’re off to an hour-long visit somewhere in Leopoldov, and then back again. That kind of thing leaves its mark, you know. If I was a sensitive type, I would have suffered more. I came to terms with it. It was the way things were. They were locked up, and we had to visit them every three months.”

  • “When she said goodbye to me, she said she would come back, and she came back ten years later. I was four years old. I know it was a terrible to-do and that she said she would come back. That stuck in my memory, but nothing else. Back then there were only three cars a day in Pivín, and suddenly we had a whole fleet of cars and policemen outside our house. One remembers that occasionally. That stuck. The rest didn’t.”

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    Pivín, 24.07.2018

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    duration: 02:16:39
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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They broke Dad’s neck on a testing machine. They tied on a winch, a rope, and broke his neck

Radslav Švéda
Radslav Švéda
photo: archiv pamětníka

Radslav Švéda was born on 2 September 1949. The 1948 Communist coup spelled disaster to his family. His grandparents, Mr and Mrs Kasparides, were evicted from their house and had their factory in Kolín confiscated that very year. In 1950 the Communists seized his parents’ farm in Lošany and evicted the family. His father Václav Švéda joined the anti-Communist resistance group of the Mašín Brothers. On 2 May 1955 he was executed in Pankrác and the urn with his ashes was destroyed. Radslav’s mother Ludmila spent ten years in prison, his grandfather František was jailed for seven years, and his uncles Vratislav and Zdeněk served eleven years each. All of their property was also confiscated. The witness was thus robbed of his parents when only four years old, with only a few hazy childhood memories of them. His mother was beautiful with thick black hair and healthy tanned skin. When she came home, she was greyed and irreparably marked by her time in the cell. Radslav Švéda later trained as a mechanic and was employed at the iron works in Prostějov for many years. After the fall of Communism he opened his own machine fitting shop in Pivín, where he now employs thirty people.