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Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

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What happened to your colleagues?<br />

The highest sentence was fifteen years for Mirek Kabeláč. They made him the leader of the<br />

group. He was older then us by about three years and they did everything how they wanted.<br />

Then they brought in the agents, Milan Eliáš and Dušek. I started to be afraid for the second<br />

time because I got the messages from them for the radio, but they didn’t say anything. They<br />

kept it to themselves.<br />

What was the name of your process and how many people were in your group?<br />

We were called the Beneš Scout Revolt – named after President Beneš 5 . The abbreviation was<br />

S.O.B., there were fourteen or fifteen of us and they caught everyone. The lowest sentences<br />

were two or three years. No one was lucky to escape.<br />

Do you remember the name of the judges or the chief prosecutor?<br />

The judge was a Hungarian Jew named Roth. Then he changed his name to Rudy. The chief<br />

prosecutor was Čížek. It was a noble cast, both of them were bad guys. It was a deterrent process.<br />

There was not much happening in that area so it came across as something quite handy for<br />

them and that’s why it took three days.<br />

What ran through your head when you heard the sentence at court?<br />

We didn’t take it seriously at that time, we were very foolish.<br />

Where did they take you after the trial?<br />

After the court they left us in prison in Chrudim and then they took us to build a dam in<br />

Křivanovice. That was only through the summer, only a short time, maybe for three weeks. The<br />

dam was built at the beginning of the fifties. Then they took us back to prison. They found out<br />

that in the working camp by the dam there were mainly, “měsíčkáři” 6 who were farmers who<br />

didn’t meet their quotas. The place wasn’t guarded much, but it didn’t really hit us that we<br />

could escape from there. To be honest with you though, we didn’t really have a place or a way<br />

how. All our escape routes we had ready before were already blocked and to try to go through<br />

was to risky in 1952. That wasn’t really possible. Then in mid-August they took us to Jáchymov 7 .<br />

They took us to the central camp named Bratrství (Brotherhood). That was the central camp in<br />

Jáchymov by the mine where there were two camps. The normal camp had pits and the other<br />

part was separated and served as a central building. There we waited for three or four days<br />

and they distributed us to different camps. I was taken to “L” 8 with Milan Netušil.<br />

What did you do in the camp?<br />

It was a really small camp with about three hundred people. We crushed the iron ore 9 . There<br />

wasn’t any other work. We were surprised about that. Right away I was put into the tower be-<br />

5 Beneš – Edward Beneš was the second President after T.G. Masaryk from 1935 to 1938. He was also a President in exile in<br />

1940–1945 and the President of <strong>Czechoslovak</strong>ia after the War (1945–1948). Together with T.G. Masaryk and M. R. Štefánik,<br />

he took part in the resistance movement during WW I and he is one of the founders of <strong>Czechoslovak</strong>ia.<br />

6 “Měsíčkáři” – formed from the Czech word for “a month” = měsíc. These people stayed in prison only for a month or<br />

a couple of months.<br />

7 Jáchymov is a spa town close to Karlovy Vary, near the German border. Working camps for prisoners were often established<br />

near these mines and political prisoners tend to call them “concentration” camps. Historians rather prefer working<br />

camps – concentration camp is a term connected with Nazism. Concentration camps existed in Southern Africa already in<br />

the early 20th century. Great Britain built them there during the Second Boer War. In <strong>Czechoslovak</strong>ia there were “vindictive”<br />

prisoners and later also political and criminal prisoners. <strong>Prisoners</strong> were used as cheap labor.<br />

8 Camp called “L,” sometimes called also a camp for liquidation. There was “a tower of death” where the prisoners were<br />

coming into direct contact with radioactive uranium.<br />

9 The narrator means ore that contains uranium.<br />

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