Abstract
The publication is based on the life story of three people in the turbulent twentieth century. It captures the life of my mom, my dad and how their fate affected my life as well. We have all been profoundly influenced by communism as an ideology and as a political practice.
The unifying axis is the story of my mother, a pre-war communist, imprisoned for years first by the Nazis and later by her own comrades for much longer, who only received her judicial rehabilitation a week after the fall of Antonín Novotný from the position of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. I drew on a rich family background archive, from the archives of this party, the archives of the Corps of Correctional Education, the General Prosecutor's Office and the Archive of the security forces. I also drew from a number of historical publications and documents, as well as from my mother's literary works with autobiographical features. I used my own experiences and memories in it.
The book is methodologically based on the modern historiographical approach of "ego history". He doesn't try to make unequivocal judgments, he will certainly contribute to asking more questions and possible answers. Not only in asking about the causes, nature, actors and consequences of the political persecutions of the 1950s and 1960s in the former Czechoslovakia. In other situations as well, when the destinies of individuals and their families were, are and will be confronted with the wheels of impersonal historical mechanisms, the action of which can hardly be influenced - and which Franz Kafka anticipated in his novel The Process. Already forty years before my mom was convicted by her comrades in the early 1950s in a real trial.
This book is not only, and not even primarily, a biographical account of the life story of three people. It is an authentic, richly documented, and based on previously unpublished findings, a report about how in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century, uncritical belief in communism shaped the life and relationships of people in the family at the time when it began to be realized in practice.