Josef Merhaut

“My dad also had a problem with it, because they forbid him to play at festivities. He was a mainstay at festivals and weddings for thirty years. A militiaman came along, I remember it as a little boy, he had tall black boots and a ruler, which he slapped himself with. They tried to knock it into my dad’s thick skull, they’d ruin him if he didn’t join the co-op, become a communist and join the Communist Party. They pressured him strongly until they left and he didn’t play for a time. In the end they didn’t even let him buy his winter wood. Until they’d roped him in and he had to sign up. Then they left him alone. He kept cursing at them, he hated them, blamed them. But he’d been registered and had peace, they stopped pressuring him.”

“My wife tells the story of when she was at school, things were even worse. In my time things were bad enough, but for her it was even worse, she’s seven years younger. It was the Catholic Mass for her father, he died early, when she was about fourteen. She crossed the gardens to the church and some old lady neighbour saw her and snitched. The teachers lived next door to her. The next day the teacher thrashed her, beat her with a stick, why she went to church. And meanwhile, her appendix burst. She drove to hospital, not from the beating, but that’s just how it was. But when she was at the hospital, at the operation, the doctors could see she’d been beaten. They asked her why. Everyone was afraid and she didn’t want to say. In the end she said the teacher had done it to her.”