After her arrest, Miluška Havlůjová did not see her baby for 2 years
- Date: 15 Jan, 2008 at 6:42AM,
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Miluška Havlůjová (Pomplová) was born into a patriotic Czech family in 1929. She was a fashion model and she also worked as an office clerk. Her parents joined the resistance movement in their area of Rožmitál pod Třemšínem during the WWII German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Her mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, but miraculously survived in the Terezienstadt fortress. Her father managed to hide until the end of WWII.
In December 1948, shortly after the communist takeover, Miluska’s father was unjustly sentenced to one year of hard labor. His daughter would not accept such an injustice and managed to smuggle a letter about her father’s sentence to the West. When her father returned home, she used the same method to inform people outside the country about what was going on in the uranium mines in Jachymov and Pribram where they used prisoners as slave labor.
Miluska Havlůjová was arrested by the Czechoslovak secret police in May 1953. In less than 6 months, her father was rearrested. Before her arrest, she was interrogated by the secret police. At that time, the interrogators took her four month old son away from her a put him in the next room for her to hear his crying. She was not allowed to change his diapers, to console him or to feed him.
The secret police interrogators were trying to persuade her to work for them by reporting on her friends and neighbors‘ activities. They forced her to look from the window at a baby carriage with a baby about the same age as her son. She was told, „Sign here and you can go home. It wasn’t until after the fall of communism in 1989, she explained why she wouldn’t sign. „Something swelled up in me. I prayed inside my head. God stood by me and I did not sign!“
She was arrested few months after her interrogation, tried for inciting activities against the State, sentenced to 5 years hard labor, 5 thousand crowns penalty, confiscation of all her property and loss of civil right for 5 years after completion of her sentence.
Because of her ill health, she was placed in a special unit. There she met the wife of a Gestapo chief, the same one who tortured her mother during WWII. She contracted tuberculosis, became quite ill and was let out of the prison 1st March 1955. Only then, almost after two years, she saw her son Tomas again.