Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

What was your experience and your brother’s experience? You had to meet political prisoners
there is that right?
There weren’t many of them there yet. They started coming in 1949 and they practically
took turns after the German prisoners. I was in Horní Slavkov where the prisoners also started
coming. There were a couple of political prisoners among them, but they never talked about
it. If you asked what they were sentenced for then you would get the answer, that they were
caught reading political magazines in someone’s apartment. They were making fun of it and
didn’t want to talk about it until they got to know you a little better. Then I met a couple boys
from Slovakia. There was a guy named Kanys. There were more of them and they were telling
me what was going on, what they were sitting for, and what things looked like so I was
informed a little bit at that time.
You were working in a lab the entire time you were there?
Later I worked as a technical controller. When the trailers for active uranium arrived, but
the content wasn’t the greatest. I was supposed to go there and check it. I did it really simply
saying, “Guys, you are just fighting against yourselves. You throw the big stones that don’t
contain any uranium away, but on the smaller ones you put a paper “A” meaning they are
for the “active trailer.” If there is no uranium they will dump it out, but if there is, you will
get 50 crowns per kilogram.” So they simply started doing this. All of a sudden a friend who
emigrated appeared. We grew up together. I was just asking him, “What are you doing here?”
He replied, “Well I came back, where do you work?” He showed me his identification and it
said that he worked in the mine of Ludvík Svoboda 6 in Ostrava, but he had a fake name there.
I told him, “Hey, play this game with someone else.” So he told me what he was doing there
and he slept over two or three times. In Jáchymov they made a forbidden zone and everyone
who lived in Jáchymov had to have this information in their ID. This friend of mine was locked
up in our village. He was arrested there because he wanted to see his mother. He stayed at an
old woman’s place, who used to be a countess. It was her property that was confiscated. As
a result they let her stay and live in a monastery. Imagine that she died in the monastery that
night. Since her lights were on men who were coming home from the pub were curious to see
what she was doing. They threw a couple small stones in and because there was no reaction
they went in. They wanted to ransack the house, but right in that moment a policeman came.
My friend was locked there in the other room and couldn’t escape because there were bars on
the window. Anyways he had a letter for me just with the information that he would go to
Mariánské Lázně near Karlovy Vary and he would like to meet me. He was asking me if I could
come to a train station. All in all, this letter was quite innocent. Now I am guessing because
I never saw it. Then I was being followed for about a month. My friend was locked up in March
and I was locked up one month later.
What was your arrest like?
I was arrested on April 25, 1952. For sure they had been keeping their eyes on me. I was transferred
from Slavkov to Rovnost (Equality). They put me there probably so they could watch me
because there were two co-workers that they had. On April 25, 1952 at the end of the afternoon
shift I came out of the shaft. We came to the gate and there they couldn’t find my ID so
6 Ludvík Svoboda (1895–1979) was an army general, in 1945 he was a Minister of Defense as an independent and in 1968
he was elected as the Czechoslovakian President.
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