Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

What was life like after the war?
Right after the important days in May 1945 I quickly joined the Scouts. I joined a good group
again, which was led by a couple of young scouts. The whole group was called “War twins.”
Later on, these guys got state honors for their Anti-German and Anti-German occupation activity.
One of them was even shot during their partisan activity. His name was Karel Šimek and he
died tragically in 1945 when he was shot by Germans. He was cutting the telephone connection
from Hradec to the airport. So these older scouts who had such incredible experiences during
the war were teaching us how to do these things. It was kind of enlightening for one that
you can always do something to affect what is happening. The scout activity finally led me to
prison, but these are already different things to talk about.
Were you lucky to finish school after WWII?
Right after the war I started an apprenticeship and I learned to be a telephone mechanic.
Right in 1950 I started going to school and I started at the College of Industry in Pardubice 4 .
One month after that I was locked up so I was locked up as a student, a student with a high
school education.
What did you think about 1948? How did you accept the change of a regime?
It was tragic because I leaned toward the National Socialists. At school we had a really great
teacher who was introducing us to quite a few different political ideas. Some things that the
Communists were doing I didn’t like at all and I had a really big aversion towards it. I remember
that we were searching for a camp in 1946 when the elections 5 were just being held and
the Communists prepared the figures and they hanged them on the square in Bystřice nad
Perštejnem and they marked them with the voting numbers of the National Socialists and the
People’s Party. They made eight or ten gallows and there they hanged these figures, meaning
they were burning the effigy of these political candidates. So a normal person could not agree
with this stuff. It goes without saying that when we were establishing the Confederation of
Political Prisoners 6 in the 1990’s we were getting similar letters, I mean threats.
What was your incarceration like and what were you actually arrested for?
The thing I was arrested for I found out much later. We had the scout group and what we
did was write threatening letters and once we also destroyed the campaign office of the Communist
party in Hradec Králové. We hid a small bomb there and later detonated it. It broke the
door, the shopping window, and all the posters hanging there. No one was injured, nothing
was burned, but it was the night before May 1, 1950. It was a demonstration against what was
happening here.
So what exactly did your arrest look like?
I came home from school and the same day I was supposed to say goodbye to my close friend
who was going to join the army. We did sports and from 1948 I participated in the regional,
county, and national tournament three times in what was called Zborov’s Race. From the regional
we moved on to the national championship. Zborov’s Race had various army disciplines,
which included sprinting, swimming, and others. One of our friends was entering the army to
join the paratroopers.
4 Pardubice – a town which is app. 26 kilometer far from Hradec Králové, towards the south.
5 In elections into Parliament in 1946 the Communistic party of Czechoslovakia won.
6 KPV – The Confederation of Political Prisoners of the Czech Republic – the association of political prisoners from former
Czechoslovakia. It was established on January 3, 1990.
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