Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

when breakfast and lunch are brought. We went out for a walk once a day for a half hour out
on the square between the blocks of Pankrác prison. A man learned something there and was
given other advice from other prisoners. The worst was when they were telling me once that
early in the morning there was some murmer they could hear. I actually came right before the
execution of Milada Horáková 9 . Of course the other prisoners knew those who were there for
a couple weeks or months on how it goes. The breakfast was longer and we were watching out
the windows onto the square whether something was happening, but Horáková was executed
off out on a corner. It was terrible for me when I saw that. We were also watching out through
a little half window that we tilted down. Though we were not allowed to do that, but a man
could look into the reflection and see that square. The awful part was the view of people called
“řetězáři” (“chainers”). Řetězáři were the people who had tried to escape. There were also
people called “provazáři” (“ropers”). “Provazáři” were people on death row. The other prisoners,
I don’t remember their names, were counting them. They knew how many were there.
When one was missing all of a sudden they were saying, “Oh well, so another one was taken
away, hung up, or sentenced.” These “provazáři” were pronouncedly down in the cellars, in
dungeons where they were waiting for executions. “Řetězáři” were people who had escaped
from labor camp and they really had leg-irons and from those they were chained to the wall.
That really existed. In that cell the prisoner couldn’t move, he was just sitting on a little chair
and couldn’t do anything else. When he needed to defecate, there was a little bucket to be
used. When they were walking on their walk, they had to hold their chains behind them because
the leg-irons had protrusions, so they had to walk with their legs wide apart, otherwise
they would trip and fall. I can tell you that was a terrible sight, for me, a twenty-year old kid,
to see that something like that existed.
What happened after that?
That’s how I lived through that time until I had a hearing at court in September. Before
that they were calling us, they were coming to us, and they were calling us until we got two
lawyers who were representing us. Roziňák and I had a man named Lindner who was a really
tough lawyer. When he read everything, all the papers, he said, “They can’t sentence you for
anything. You can just get something for the disturbance in the pub. Maybe you will get a year
or two. They will sentence you and put you into a military prison. Yet, other paragraphs that
are here like spying, high treason, and disrupting the socialist state they can not prove because
there is no proof and it’s all just fiction.” Finally there was a trial. The first day we all thought
that through all the contacts with our families and through our lawyers, that our wife and kids
would be in that big hall. We were having court in that huge hall as Horáková did and all these
cases. We thought that we would see our relatives somewhere, but when they were dragging
us through the corridors no one was there. We came to the reception hall and there was also
no one waiting. The first one to be called in was Mr. Modrý who was testifying for almost half
a day. In the afternoon it was me. I was next. Our court hearing was for two days actually. We
were really surprised that the court wasn’t a civil court. There were twelve of us, six civilians
and six soldiers. We learned from the papers that they didn’t have a civilian court, but we had
a military court. They also called the process to be top secret so people who had nothing to
9 Dr. Milada Horáková was a Czech politician, executed during the communist political processes in the fifties, for putative
conspiracy and high treason.
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