The students were divided into kulaks, capitalists and the rest

In February 1948, Vladimír Hradec was attending the grammar school in Poděbrady. “On the morning following the coup, we could see militiamen on our way to school. They must have counted on something like that, with their guns ready. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them,” he recalled. Hradec’s Latin teacher Puček, who had been a National Socialist, proclaimed himself as the president of the action committee at the grammar school and together with selected students, he went off to apply for membership in the Communist Party. All the other teachers and students were taken aback by the events: “Immediately, there was pressure to become a member of the Youth Union, the motto was: ‘Who is not with us, is against us.’” Some of the students, especially those who were the “sons of kulaks,” had to face obstacles in completing their final exams or when they just wanted to enter the school building: “People got used to it all – it was a reality and nothing could be done about that.” Hradec’s classmates who came from families with a Communist background, started to look down on all the others. However, this had been happening since 1946, when the Communists won the parliamentary elections: “It was apparent that the students started to get divided into groups: the son of a kulak, the son of a capitalist...” In the end, Vladimír Hradec graduated from the grammar school in 1950. In the same year, Ctirad Mašín had also graduated, but he was in a parallel class.