They came for my father a little before four in the morning, and the search that followed went on for hours. I do not remember hearing them arrive, only waking up to the fact that they were already there, moving through the rooms and going through everything we owned.

Since I knew what the police could make of certain things if they found them, I spent part of that search getting rid of three objects before anyone thought to look for them: Janko’s modified starter pistol, some .22 caliber ammunition, and a metal noisemaking device that belonged to Peter, the one he had from Výčapky. I threw all three out the window while the police were occupied elsewhere in the apartment, and none of them was ever found.

They took a great deal of paper and other material that morning. I remember them taking my father’s medals, and I remember a copy of Mein Kampf. Decades later, when I finally saw the state’s own inventory of that search, it listed two copies, not one — which is the kind of small correction the archive kept handing me as I went through it, sixty years after the fact.

There were also things my father had not kept in our apartment. Our neighbor Mr. Doležal had held a pistol for him, along with wartime underground papers and some old securities. Of those things, the only ones I personally remember seeing were the securities. My later understanding was that the material had been buried, that some papers were damaged or destroyed, and that the pistol was eventually thrown into the Vltava. That is later family understanding, not something I watched happen.

I could not stay for the whole search because I had to leave for school at AŽD, so I did not see my father taken away and I did not see the search finish. When I came home that afternoon he was simply gone, and my mother had not been told why he was being arrested or where they had taken him. We talked about it that evening the way a family does when it has no facts to work with, and since Kudibal was the one obvious danger in my father’s recent life, that was where our minds went first. It was only a guess. Nobody actually knew.

What we knew before the arrest amounted to very little. My father saw a man named Professor Josef Drachovský about once a year, and he never told me anything about what they discussed. I did not know that a man named Josef Marek, or our family friend Mr. Třešňák, had anything to do with those conversations. Mr. Třešňák was not some distant acquaintance from my father’s past — he and his wife were close friends of the family, people we visited many times over the years, and I called them strýc Třešňák and teta Třešňáková the way I would call any close relative.

My sister Jana knew, through her work, that Marek had been arrested at some point, but none of us connected that to my father until the case became public at the trial. That is worth saying plainly, because it would be easy now, knowing how the pieces fit together, to imagine that we saw it coming. We did not.

After his first imprisonment my father had made his social circle as small as he could keep it, since he did not want to give the authorities any excuse to send him back. I have told the story of Kudibal already, and it says something about how careful he had become. Looking back on it now I would call it close to paranoid, except that it turned out not to be paranoid enough.

Between the arrest and the trial there was almost nothing. No visits that I remember, no letters, no message from my father of any kind. We did not know where he was being held or what the case was even about.

Pepa’s mother had a boyfriend who was in the secret police. She introduced me to him and, at first, he tried to find out what was happening. Later he told us that the case was too large for him to do anything about. When he gave me that answer, he made a point of telling me that if the Communists ever lost power, he wanted me to remember — and, if necessary, testify — that he had tried to help me. I thought that was funny. I never knew exactly what he had been able to see or whom he had asked.

Many years later, from old security records, I learned that the situation was not what I had believed at the time. The man was not actually a secret policeman, and there was later an official case concerning the way he had represented himself.

I later learned from the file that my mother, Marie, had gone out and hired a lawyer, a man named JUDr. Jiří Vízek, about a month after the arrest. I knew nothing about him at the time. Whatever contact she had with him did not translate into anything the rest of us understood about the charge or my father’s whereabouts.

At some point word reached my mother that my father was sick. I believe she was told he had suffered a heart attack, though I could not tell you today who told her that or in what words. Years later I came across a neighborhood police report from October of 1960 that mentions a rumored heart attack, and a prison medical certificate from around the same time documenting serious, chronic tuberculosis and lung disease. The medical certificate does not by itself prove there was a heart attack. It only confirms that he was, by then, a genuinely sick man.

The trial was on 28 February 1961, and my mother, Jana, and I were there in the courtroom. I remember it as a fairly short proceeding — I do not remember extensive questioning of witnesses, or of my father himself. Mostly the prosecution and the defense lawyers made their arguments, and then the court passed sentence. By then we had learned that the case involved Marek and a document he was understood to have written, describing some proposed organization, with my father named as one of its leaders. I did not follow the legal details closely enough to say more than that it was our understanding at the time that Marek had written it.

It was in that courtroom that Jana finally put together what she had heard at work about Marek’s arrest with what was happening to our father. I do not remember whether Třešňák appeared as a defendant, a witness, or in some other role — it did not seem important to me at the time, and I am not going to invent an answer to it now.

What I remember most clearly is being angry. My father had spent years going out of his way to avoid people and situations that might give the state a reason to lock him up again, and here he was, locked up again anyway.

Separately, I remember being told — I do not remember whether it was my father himself or my mother who told me — that he said he had been sick and did not remember any such conversation, or being asked to lead anything. I am not going to try to reconcile that memory with what I found years later in the records of his interrogations. They are different sources, and they may not agree.

The records show that he was taken into custody at Prague-Ruzyně prison around noon that first day and formally charged within days with subversion of the republic. We knew none of that at the time. We did not know where they had taken him or what he had been charged with. We did not learn what the case was about until the trial. According to his own statements in the file, he acknowledged knowing both Drachovský and Marek, and he acknowledged that Drachovský had approached him about restoring the old Czech National Council. His position, as the record has it, was that he declined — partly because of his health, partly because he thought the whole idea unrealistic, and partly because he believed that any legitimate restoration of such a body would have to happen through legal means. He denied ever knowingly joining an illegal organization or accepting any leadership role in it.

Other people gave the investigators more than that. Drachovský and Marek were recorded as saying more incriminating things, Třešňák had made statements of his own, and there were documents that put my father’s name in a proposed leadership role. For a while, the case was pushed toward the far more serious charge of high treason. That is not, in the end, what he was convicted of. When the court finally ruled, on 28 February 1961, it found him guilty of subversion of the republic under §79a(2)(a) — not high treason — and sentenced him to three years in prison along with the loss of his civic rights for as long as the sentence lasted.

I was told that Drachovský was a very old man, sick and in a wheelchair when he was questioned, and that he died during that period, before my father’s trial. Over the years I came to think of that as his having died during questioning, but I do not actually know that he died while he was being interrogated.

Even now, having read all of it, I cannot say exactly how much he knew or how deeply he was involved.

One piece of evidence at the trial was a satirical text, mildly anti-regime, that the police had found in the apartment during the search, and the investigators used it as proof of my father’s hostile attitude toward the state. In his interrogation, he said he had picked it up years earlier at Elektročas, put it in a pocket, forgotten about it, and should have either reported it or thrown it away.

That is not how it happened. The pamphlet belonged to Jana. She had brought it home from her own work — it made fun of what life was like for a woman in a Communist country — and my family knew this, both at the time and after my father came home from prison. It was hers, not his. I believe he claimed it as his own because he was protecting her.

Emil Maiwald, who had been connected with my father’s first case, was questioned too. He gave the investigators an unflattering picture of my father, but the same record also says that in their more recent visits, roughly 1957 to 1959, the two men had not discussed politics at all.

I remember one of Maiwald’s visits to our apartment. My father went out into the long corridor by the front door to speak with him, with my mother there. I do not think Maiwald was invited to sit down properly. Afterward my parents were disturbed that he had come at all. They came to believe that he might have been sent by the secret police to see whether my father would say something incriminating. That was their interpretation. I have no way to know whether it was true.

There is one other thing I heard with my own ears that affects how I read the case. On an Elektročas winter trip somewhere in the Krkonoše — I no longer know the lodge or the year — I was in a large bathroom when I overheard my father talking to another man from work. My father said that wartime underground resistance had been possible because there was a common enemy almost everyone recognized, the Germans, and most of the Czech population supported the resistance. Under Communism, he said, underground activity of that kind was impossible because you never knew whom you could trust.

I do not take that bathroom conversation as proof that he was innocent in the later National Council case. I take it as evidence of what he himself believed when he was speaking privately to a colleague rather than to an investigator or a court.

My father always told me that he did not belong to, or believe in, any particular political party, and in one of his December interrogations he told the investigators exactly the same thing.

My own guess, for what it is worth, having known him as long as I did, is that he probably did know about the discussions and understood roughly what Drachovský and Marek were proposing. I do not think he would have agreed to join an underground political organization, and I do not think he would have turned any of them in or testified against them willingly. Knowing about something, declining to take part in it, and refusing to inform on the people involved are three different things, and I think all three were true of him at once.

I do not remember visiting my father in prison during that sentence, and I do not remember my mother visiting him either. I could not tell you which prison he was sent to. What I remember is continuing to hear, through my mother, that he was seriously ill.

On 10 May 1962 the Prague Municipal Court applied the President’s amnesty, issued the day before, to my father’s case. It remitted what was left of his sentence — one year, four months, and twelve days — conditionally, for ten years, as well as the remaining penalty affecting his civic rights.

I was at AŽD when they brought him home and did not see him arrive. When I got back that day my mother told me he had come home on a stretcher and gone straight into bed. By the time I actually saw him he was very thin, breathing with real difficulty, and unable to get out of bed for some while.

Our cousin Tona, who was a doctor, came to look at him. I think there may have been a hospital stay around then too, though I am not certain enough of it to say it happened. After the tests, Tona told the family plainly that my father had about three months left to live.

He did not die. He recovered slowly, over a long time, and he recovered well enough that Tona eventually took him to Tábor to see me during my army service, and later took him on the trip to Slovakia — but those are their own stories, and this is not the place to tell them.

I am not going to try to settle here whether my father was guilty of what they said he was. What I can tell you is what happened to my family: after years of him trying not to give the state any excuse, they arrested him anyway, and for months we knew almost nothing. When they finally let him go, he came home so sick that a doctor in the family gave him three months.

He did not die. Slowly, he recovered.