Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

The incarcerated were beaten in various ways, they suffered from sleep deprivation, they
were forced to walk in their cells back and forth, often they did not get any food, they were
brought low, and threatened that their wives, children, or friends would be arrested as well.
However, there were also other, drastic methods of interrogations, from tying, hanging up,
hitting the sensitive parts of body, to using electricity and faking executions 23 . Josef Kycka
remembers this experience very well, “They came up to me. You know, I didn’t wash there
for three months, just wiping with a piece of cloth, you couldn’t comb your hair. My hair was
getting long, all glued together with oil…so they came to ask me whether I would like to take
a bath. So I went. They twisted a towel around my head, leading me to the bathroom. There
was a beautiful bathtub with clean, warm water. I couldn’t wait, took my clothes off quickly,
got inside and all of a sudden it started to move. I cannot describe this well. My eyes were
blinking, mouth was moving, arms and legs everywhere…I fell out of the bathtub, in each
joint there was so much pain. They sent electricity into the tub. So I was washed for a long
time this way.”
Women were not spared from this inhuman treatment. Julie Hrušková remembers one interrogation,
“I went through one extremely hard interrogation when they hit my head against
the table, slid me around, pushed my body towards the closet, anything that came up in their
minds. I tried not to fall down. Finally a telephone saved me because they had to get to another
arrest. The guard took me to Orlí, where they put me into solitary confinement. In the
early hours of morning I found out I was bleeding. I called for a doctor, but the secret police
officers had no time to take me to the hospital like the prison doctor ordered them to do.
I was pregnant by my American soldier. I was already in the third month and I aborted. They
let me bleed for three days until total exhaustion set in. The whole ward of prison was rebelling,
demanding someone help me. Finally one old guard helped me and on his own risk he
transported me to the hospital in Brno. There they saved my life, but the child was dead.”
The same story we can get from the investigation report of Vlasta Charvátova, who had such
a brutal hearing that it led to the loss of her baby, “I had to get naked and without a mattress
and blankets I was kept for another ten days… After I was put into a dark room and I found
out I was bleeding badly so I told this to Pešek, who was the investigator and also the woman
who was guarding me. I mentioned I was afraid of aborting my baby. I asked both of them for
a doctor, but Pešek just answered that it would be better off if another beast like me would
never be brought into the world.“
Physical violence was one of the most common ways people were pushed into confession or
at least to say something at all whether it was true or not. Some people also went through
the Gestapo hearings of WWII and some commented this way, “The Fascist torturer wanted to
tear out the truth from you, the Communists in this country wanted the lie.” Bringing a person
down was also another widely used method. These methods were also crossing the bounds of
human logic and that can be illustrated in the words of Ladislav Holdoš, “In the morning some-
23 How the interrogations were run and what was happening during the investigation we can picture thanks to the report
from a complaint of Dr. Horňanský who complained about practices in prison in Uherské Hradiště in South Moravia, “He
said (the suspected), was assaulted with fists to his head so that he bled out of his nose. He was put his face down, beat
with rubber truncheons, mainly on the chest, lower back, buttocks, and legs. He was mainly hit to his feet where blister
bruises appeared afterwards. He was forced to do knee bends and in case he fell he was kicked. Then the electricity was
used during the investigation process, the electrodes were put into his shoes… After the hearing he was put onto a metal
bed and each arm was tied to the bars of the headboard.”
Czechoslovak Political Prisoners 15