Václav Brůna

“There was a haystack which belonged to one farmer, certain Mr. Černý, and he had it here, about two hundred and fifty metres from here when I walked this way behind the house. My father would always get a loaf of bread on Fridays and something to spread on it. Some people, father’s acquaintances, would donate the bread so that nobody else would learn about it, and I would carry it there in the evenings as it was getting dark. The entrance to the haystack was in the direction of Klapý – they had a block of hay pulled out from one side and I would always place the bread and lard there and cover it like this. Dad always told me: ‘If you see some light, dive to the ground immediately and get out of there, because that could mean that somebody is watching you.’ But this never happened. It went on this way until the revolution. For about six months. They were a teacher, a blacksmith and a wheelwright. Three Russians. The teacher was here once, because nobody could speak Russian and they could speak German and my mom could speak German as well, because she was from Něštěmice. He thus told us that when Germany had been bombed, their prison got hit and several of them escaped and they got all the way here to Velkáň.”

“They wanted to establish a Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) in Dlažkovice. My father did not want to get into the JZD, and they imprisoned him for that. Exactly on Christmas Eve, at four o’clock they came for him and imprisoned him. He spent about three days in the prison in Lovosice and then he was investigated in Litoměřice for four months. There were so many of us children and nobody gave any money to our mom. When they took dad away, instead of celebrating Christmas we were all crying for the whole night. In the morning I got on my motorbike and I went to all the prisons, but everywhere they told me that if he had been there he would have been registered. He was in Lovosice and the warden denied it, he claimed that dad was not there but he was there. We only found him when the court trial was held, and we discovered that he was in detention in Litoměřice.”

“When they imprisoned dad, at first they did a house search in our house. They discovered that there was an antenna in the gutter pipe. and so they started looking for a transmitter. But the transmitter was already gone. The priest had had it. I would always take him for the holy mass on my motorbike and then bring him back. And he had taken away the box with the transmitter a month ago. But he left the antenna there. There was a pigeon loft there, and the antenna led all the way to the pigeon loft, and they were searching for it - they used lights, a kind of lanterns - and the antenna led all the way to the pigeon loft and they found out that the antenna led through the gutter pipe. And so in the morning they arrived for me, they picked me up and they interrogated me in Litoměřice. I was interrogated about five times. They changed shifts at twelve o’clock. One came in, beat me over my mouth, and left. Then the others came. They washed me with a sponge. I was not allowed to defend myself, otherwise I would have jumped out and killed him on the spot! They were asking: ‘Who did this to you?’ But they knew it too well, because one time I heard them calling the other one to come in… And one day they brought me in there and I saw that they were carrying another person out of the room and water was dripping from him, he had probably gotten beaten, too, and they wanted me to psychically… But I was tough. The more they went after me, the tougher I was. I still didn’t know what they were after. Eventually: ‘Where is the transmitter?’ - ‘You were searching for it, weren’t you? Did you find any transmitter? And how did you find out where the transmitter was?’ – ‘Well, there is an antenna wire and the antenna leads through the gutter pipe.’ I said: ‘That could be from the war as well! The priest could have it there!’ I misled them so much that they eventually came to believe it and then it was over. But they still could not get it why the wire was still there. Well, nobody was going there, that’s why… The wire was really there all the time since the war? That would be stupid, too. But they let themselves get fooled like this. I thus took a ladder, I climbed up there and really, there it was, five or six metres of rolled copper wire with a kind of reels and I thus took it all down and I thought: ‘So I got all this beating because of that.’”