Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

held a trial and always sentenced someone to death and they would always kill him in our yard
behind the well for water. Once my grandma was going outside to throw out potato peels
and she saw how they shot someone in the back of the neck. So then they started shooting
everyone in our yard.
Did you have the chance to talk to Gulag prisoners about their fate?
These Cossacks were telling us unbelievable stories for example, a group was running along
the labor camp and they were yelling that they didn’t meet the quotas and they should get
death as a punishment. They were reporting themselves asking for death. I didn’t understand
why. I was telling myself that wasn’t possible. There were cases where a prisoner would tell
you he didn’t even know why he was there and that he never found out. Then his neighbor
would come into the Gulag and he would convince the first guy that he had informed against
the first guy and so on. Then the next guy would come into the Gulag and say he had informed
on the neighbor. I was always imagining that Gulags or exile was something like exile during
the era of the Tsar, but after the stories we were told I found out that these Gulags were liquidation
camps where the whole families were separated. Wives on one place, kids to another,
and these people would die there starving and in utter misery. They had to build their own
dugouts and live in that. I don’t know how they did this when it was 40 degrees below zero.
We were not even able to imagine it. We were suspecting that they were only saying it to get
drink or wine because when they were sober they didn’t want to talk about it at all. Only the
army would be their answer.
Who exactly told you these stories?
These stories were told by Cossacks who were accommodated in our house and then when
we helped in the bakery. It was in the bakery where we helped to mix dough, make bread,
carry bread, and so on. The bakers were telling us about it. There was a guy telling us he was
a priest and we thought he was a priest, but then when we learned more about the Russian
language we found out he was a prince, Sokolovsky. He was the captain of the second navy
class and from 1921 he was in the Gulags in Siberia. He went through many Gulags and he said
that his ability to bake saved his life. He would always bake some pastries for the commanders
and would be saved. He was already sixty maybe sixty-seven. He was really deaf because somewhere
close to him a mine exploded or something similar to that.
All this happened before Communism started in 1948. Did you have any notion of what
Communism meant?
I did because there was an old postman living nearby. He was a democrat and I used to go
on visits to see him. We talked and he was explaining what democracy meant and gave me
three books. These books were called “October Revolution” and they were written by Trotsky.
It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t a novel. It was written chronologically and for example there was:
Town Carycin, November 7, 7 p.m. or 8 p.m., A professor and his family was executed behind
the town garages, or Leningrad, 8 p.m., from the bridge someone threw a doctor and his family
into the Niva. There were more stories that happened in other towns and at different hours.
The officials who did this were also described in the books.
You told me that your brother got lost at the Russian Front and you got the announcement
about his death. Did you find out later what happened to him?
After the war my brother came home. He told us that when he was captured near Odessa he
had to walk to Jekatěrinodar. They forced them to walk. When Svoboda decided to organize
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