ABSTRACT
Between 1948 and the mid-1950s, the consolidation of communist control in Czechoslovakia was accompanied by a 'wave of terror'. This chapter focuses on a combination of written memoirs, oral interviews and archival documents to explore women's experiences of repression in Czechoslovakia during the period from 1948 to 1968, encompassing women who experienced both direct and indirect or 'collateral' repression as a result of the communist regime's policy of 'punishment through kinship'. Contemporary estimates suggest that between 1948 and 1954, at least 90,000 Czechoslovak citizens were convicted under Article 231. Forced labour constituted a central aspect of women's experiences of incarceration, and many former prisoners have described how they struggled to cope with the demanding labour they were subjected to. Women prisoners were frequently forced to strip naked for interrogations and intimate examinations undertaken by male guards. The deliberate erosion of kinship and loss of family relations was a well-established method used to isolate and control political prisoners in communist Czechoslovakia.
