The life story of three people
The book is based on the life story of three people in the turbulent twentieth century. It captures my mom's life, my dad's life, and how their fate affected my life. We have all been profoundly influenced by communism as an ideology and as a political practice. The unifying axis is my mother's story, pre-war communist women, imprisoned for years, first by the Nazis and later for much longer by their own comrades, who did not receive her judicial rehabilitation until a week after the fall of Antonín Novotný from his post as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. I have drawn on a rich family archive, from the archives of this party, the archives of the Department of Corrections, General Prosecutor's Office and the Security Forces Archive. I also drew on a number of historical publications and documents, as well as my mother's literary works with autobiographical features. I also used my own experiences and memories in it. The book is methodologically based on the modern historiographical approach of "ego history". It does not try to make clear judgments, but it will certainly contribute to raising more questions and possible answers. Not only in questioning the causes, nature, actors and consequences of the political persecutions of the 1950s and 1960s in the former Czechoslovakia. Even in other situations, when the fates of individuals and their families have been, are and will be confronted with a set of impersonal historical mechanisms, whose action can hardly be influenced - and which Franz Kafka anticipated in his novel The Trial. Forty years before my mother was convicted by her comrades in a real trial in the early 1950s. This book is not only or even primarily a biographical account of the life story of three people. It is an authentic, richly documented and unpublished account of how the uncritical belief in communism shaped the lives and relationships of people in the family in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century, when it began to be put into practice.
