Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

cape. I was even considered a “runaway” for a short time, because at one point I was transporting
stone on small wagons from mining shafts to the lift that took the stone up. One Sunday
this group didn’t take me on the shift and during the evening they tried to escape. I can tell
that this was my holy luck or maybe my bad luck that I couldn’t participate in this. For a long
time they had agreed that they would try to escape and one guard even helped them. The
worst was that they caught them and shot them. When they brought them back to camp they
just threw them on the camp like they were nothing and everyone had to walk around them.
Beware to anyone who had their head down or made a cross. If you did, you were hit right
away and almost knocked out. It was something horrible to see shot dead friends. It was almost
the whole of Kukal’s group that tried to escape. I worked with them a couple of shifts and from
this base they took me to Ruzyně 27 . I can tell you at Ruzyně I went through something similar to
the “domeček.” They wanted to shake out or beat out from me that I knew about the escape
and that I didn’t want to tell the secret police. I knew a little bit, but I didn’t have a clue that
the group had agreed for a long time. Kukal wrote a book 28 then about the escape. When I met
him, he signed the book and wrote me a message in it, “We escaped you, thank god!” They
actually escaped away from me and saved my life this way, because if I had gone with them
they probably would have shot me like the others. So then I was at Ruzyně in Prague.
What memories do you have of the prison in Ruzyně?
I was in Ruzyně for about a half year and they still tried to get out of me what I knew about
the escape. Again, they tried to trap me. It was at my lowest point and I didn’t think I was going
to get out from the bottom. Once I even heard down in the dungeon an International song 29
being sung. There were people yelling and singing of the International song and the guards
were beating them. I heard them weeping… and it was Slánský and Co. 30 Down there in the
dungeons was all of Slánský’s group who were finally sentenced to death and executed.
They assigned a priest to me and I didn’t know whether it was a real priest, but he continued
to insist he was. They knew psychologically I was doing really bad. The priest wanted me to
write a “moták” to my parents so that they would have news of me. There were a couple of
months where no one knew anything about me, where I was, if I was living, or if they already
shot me. The priest made me write a “moták,” especially to my sister who still worked in the
office of Martin Bow. Again they wanted to prove that I was connected to this office even
though Mr. Bow wasn’t there and someone else had already taken over. The priest kept saying
that he has good connections through one of the guards and that they would give it to my
sister. So I wrote a little message on a piece of paper that he gave me, but I did it very carefully.
I told them to say hello to uncle this and that although the uncle had been dead for a while.
I believed she would understand that the letter wasn’t a true one. Later I found out that this
priest was for sure an imposter and a confidante of the state and was assigned to me to trap
me. When he gave the message to my sister out in the street, they arrested her and wanted to
27 Ruzyně is the name of a Prague district and a prison in it. Some well known people were kept there during the communist
totality.
28 KUKAL, Karel: Deset křížů. (Ten crosses). 2. Vydání, upravené a rozšířené. Rychnov nad Kněžnou: Ježek, 2003. 127 s.
29 Internacional song is an international anthem of the labor movement, which is sung in many countries by Communists
and sometimes Socialists and Social Democrats too.
30 Process with Rudolf Slánský – Political processes launched against all sections of society, which did not miss even the
main representatives of the Communist Party. From 1950 the State secret police concentrated on “searching the enemy
even among its own.“ The leading communist investigated was Secretary-General of the Communist Party Rudolf Slánský.
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