My mother’s sister, teta Manci, was married to strýc Lóňa, who was a doctor. Their children were Vierka and Janko. After the war they lived in Mariánské Lázně, where Lóňa had his office. After what happened with Kudibal, which I have written about in his story, they moved to Radošina, and there Lóňa was the regional doctor.

Radošina was a small town, but it was a lot bigger than Výčapky. It had stores and a church, and it had the end station of the railway and the buildings that went with it.

Teta Manci was nice to me, but she was somewhat reserved. Strýc Lóňa was the nicest. Janko was older than Peter and I liked him. Vierka was older still and she was very moody, and although I liked her we did not play much together, since the difference in age was too big. Babička sometimes stayed there as well, and it was about the same with her in Radošina as it was in Výčapky.

Lóňa’s office was in the same building as the house, but it had its own entrance for the patients, who came there to see him. I was not allowed to play with any of the medical equipment. I was sometimes allowed to use his typewriter.

He also had an ambulance assigned to him, with a driver, for making his rounds through the villages around Radošina. It looked more like a station wagon than what an ambulance looks like now, and it was parked near the railway station. One time I tried to get into it with a key and I broke the key off in the lock. Lóňa was not happy about it, but there was no punishment.

The postman came once a day, and the first thing he was offered was a shot of slivovice. It was normal in that house to offer a shot to grown-ups who came by for something or came to visit. I am not sure about the patients, and I do not think so. My joke now is that it must have been hard for the postman to finish the rest of his route in Radošina if the other houses treated him the same way.

Radošina was the end of the line of the railway we called the Radošinka, and the station was very close to Lóňa’s house. Across the street from the house there was a large building where they serviced the locomotives. They were steam locomotives. I particularly remember one larger one and a smaller one that was called Kačenka.

The boy next door was about my age and we played together a lot. I do not remember his name any more. I have a photograph taken in Radošina and he is standing next to me in it, second from the left. Going to the locomotives was one of the things we did together.

The two of us became good friends with the drivers and the crews. They took us up into the cab and showed us everything, and they let us blow the whistle. Since Radošina was the end of the line, the locomotive had to be turned around and connected again for the trip back, and they took us along for that. I remember being inside the locomotive while it was turned and then coupled back to the train. I remember all of it as very exciting — the machinery and the controls, the heat, the sounds and the smells.

My mother knew about it, and so did my cousins and Lóňa and Manci. I do not remember whether I ever told my father.

I think now that people may have been especially nice to me because Lóňa was the only doctor around there. Nobody ever told me that was the reason. It is only what I think now.

When I was in Radošina everybody in the family went to church on Sunday. One Mass I remember particularly. The priest talked about the atomic bomb that had already been used, and then he talked about the new hydrogen bomb, and he said that it could do very much more than the atomic bomb could. I do not remember his exact words, and I do not remember whether he named any places. I assume now that the atomic bombs he was talking about were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I remember that everybody was scared. After church it was just a normal day, and I do not remember any special Sunday routine.

One of Lóňa’s hobbies was hunting. After my father was arrested he had to get rid of his hunting guns. Lóňa was the only one in the family who belonged to a hunting group and could legally own hunting guns, so Lóňa took them.

Lóňa took me along once on an overnight hunt for deer. He had me carry one of my father’s guns, a combination gun with a shotgun barrel and a rifle barrel, one above the other. I do not believe it was loaded while I was carrying it. We stayed the night in a hunting cabin, and I remember drinking from Lóňa’s flask of slivovice. Early the next morning we went looking for deer and we did not get one. On the way back Lóňa put a paper target on a tree, loaded the rifle and let me shoot. Except for Peter’s BB gun, that was the first time I fired a real gun.

Janko gave me a modified starter pistol. I think I asked him for it and he was nice enough to give it to me, and he gave me a few small .22 rounds with it. Back in Prague I used to fire it secretly into the inside of the heavy freestanding wardrobes that stood in our entryway. Neither my mother nor my father ever knew that I had the pistol and the rounds, or that I had fired it inside the apartment.

I was about seven years old when my mother’s jewelry was stolen in Radošina, and the boy who did it with me was the boy from next door.

My mother was sleeping in the room upstairs that we called the mansarda, and there was a balcony next to her room. The two of us climbed up to the balcony and took her jewelry out of a drawer. We put it in a wooden box and buried it under the seat on the front porch of his house next door.

When the jewelry was missed we were the ones they suspected, and we denied it. Strýc Lóňa sat the two of us down in the neighbors’ living room and gave us a last chance to say it. Otherwise, he said, the police would come with wolf dogs that could sniff out which boys had done it, and then we would be at the mercy of the dogs. We confessed and we told them where it was.

While my father was in prison, my mother and Jana and I went to see him. The first time was at Bory in Plzeň. I think we were separated from him by glass there. It was scary and I do not remember much else about it. Later the visits were at Ilava, in a large room where each family had its own table, and those were more relaxed. He did not look well.

At one of the later visits at Ilava my mother told him about the jewelry. He spent the whole visit on it. He told me that even professional thieves in prison had a code that you do not steal from your own family and from your friends, and he told me that I would be the cause of his death. I was devastated.

From then on Jana had me down as a thief, and it stayed with her the rest of her life. It could be brought up again any time I did something wrong.

In 2012 we went to Radošina with my children and Jana’s daughter. The house next door, where my friend had lived, looked neglected. I wanted to knock on the door and find out whether he still lived there. Jana became furious and shouted that we were thieves, so I left it alone and we left.