Karel Nerad

"The worst thing we remember, unfortunately not my wife today, was that the so-called senior party workers at the district party committee took revenge. I don't understand for what reasons they took revenge not on me directly, but on my family. My elder son, when he finished primary school, we enrolled him in the high school where my wife taught. He was banned from school. I asked why they didn't punish me. He said it was none of my business, he just wasn't allowed. My wife and I did not understand at all as to why they were punishing the children and not me. My wife teaches at the high school, and her son can't attend the school? My personnel officer at the factory was secretly cheering me on. One day she told me he was coming, I can't remember his name now, that he used to work in Chomutov. She said he was coming to visit, he was foreign minister in Russia. He asked me if I wanted to write to him. So I wrote to him, I asked him directly why they weren't punishing me, but the boy. That they'd raise a man who would hate the regime. A fortnight later, the phone rang. I just heard my wife say that it wasn't true. The director of the industrial school called and said that he had been ordered to accept our son."

"I was at home and we heard a terrible crashing and banging. I remember that my father was a machinist in Ústí because he had left the railroad, in the so-called Schicht factories. I always used to go to meet him. Unfortunately, at the time it blew, I was walking towards him. And what I saw on the way - horrible! I saw with my own eyes how they shot each other."