Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

on a chair all the time. For the time that she was away, we stayed at Heřmanův Městec for
about a year. She left in October and came back around Easter of the following year, so it was
almost one whole school year. Then I was kind of jumping from one school to another. In my
first year of grammar school I went to Chrudim, then another half year to Trutnov, and the
rest of the time up until graduation I was in Chrudim. It wasn’t possible to do it any other
way.
How would you define your anti-state activity? Were you actually aware of doing something
wrong?
Yes, of course I was… We started to issue leaflets and I also started a contact with two agents
Milan Eliáš and Marcal. They were connected to the CIC 2 , the one named Milan had an uncle in
the American Embassy in Germany. So they had a straight connection to Germany and I worked
as a wireless operator. In addition to that, because of our Christian relatives, I was also helping
monasteries that wanted to be in touch through letters. So I was going to them and distributing
letters. This whole thing was organized by an abbot from Želiva monastery, Vít Tajovský.
I was asked to help with this by the dean named František Kolář. I was reliable because my
aunt was an assistant to the head nun of the Sister’s School. At the beginning of the war the
whole monastery moved to Rome. My mother cured Mr. Tajovský during the war and saved
him from being put into war. The information I was distributing was up to date in 1949. Then
monks were imprisoned one after the other, so it wasn’t that up to date anymore. We were
doing three different routes. The first one I did with the Dean, because he had a motorcycle.
The other two I did alone, because it was not as conspicuous. However, they didn’t find this out
about me, only the leaflets.
When did you start helping and when did you start printing the leaflets?
I started in 1949. Before that year the situation was completely different. The Sokol 3 gathering
in 1948 was very anti-communistic, but after that the regime was stricter. Generally, people
thought that the situation could not last for a long time. Gradually they started suppressing
the free information from the media so we all wanted to inform people about the truth,
whether it was international or national information. The edition was from a hundred to two
hundred printed copies. The conditions for copying were really hard at that time so we had to
use stencils. It wasn’t really easy to produce a high number of printed copies. Because it was
done in Eastern Bohemia the center for everything was in Heřmanův Městec. That was the
town where the majority of people from this group came from.
How often did you distribute the leaflets and who wrote them?
On average, once every two months. The terms were not fixed of course. When there was
a lot of news we wrote the comments on them as quickly as possible so that it would still be up
to date. The content was set after the agreement and then each of us prepared one response.
Then we laid it out and edited it. We were distributing it unofficially of course, putting it into
people’s mailboxes.
2 Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) was an American intelligence service established during WWII in December 1943. Its
task was to search for and eliminate German agents in the ranks of allied armies. After WWII its activities were focused on
the Soviet Bloc, and especially in the 50’s it recruited and trained agents who were employed to work within the region
of Soviet influence including Czechoslovakia.
3 Sokol – The Czech association of Sokol (ČOS) is a civil association, whose almost 190 000 members attended voluntary
sports and physical activities in clubs of Sokol. It promoted versatility and cultural activities.
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