Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

thing terrible happened. The door opened and into the pigsty came a guard with a tub full
of shit. He was telling me to wash myself, I refused, showing him the water in the tub wasn’t
clean. The guard was ordering me though, to wash myself! Again I didn’t want to do it. So he
grabbed my neck and put my head into the tub and I started to fling about… No where (in
any other prison that Mr. Holdoš went through) did they every degrade us like they did in this
one instant.”
The investigators found another way to persuade Communists who were also victims and
involved in the process with Rudolf Slánský. Those were the people who most trusted Communism
and its ideas until the very final moment they thought it was either a mistake or that with
their confession they were helping the Communist party. Ladislav Holdoš, who was persuaded
or passionately communist described this tactic this way, “In October 1951 I started to “plead”
again. The party wants that, so I will do it. There was Doubek, the boss of the investigators
and he was present during one of my interrogations. Throttling me and yelling that I would
confess something that I had never dreamed about… Doubek said, “You are on one side of
the river, the party is on the other. If you want to help it, you will have to jump into the cold
water, swim across, confess your guilt as well as the others. Then everything will be alright.”
The methods of investigating had just one aim, to destroy the suspects’ morality, to undermine
their dignity, and force them to into confession. To confess was very important to investigators
because that was the base under which the whole process was built. From their point of view,
it was necessary to make the accused person speak. It was not important whether he said the
truth or a lie, more important was whether it suited the direction of the investigation. At the
end of the investigation there was a trial, which was a comedy though, because the sentences
were already prepared. In any case, none of the sentences were short. Most of the time the
punishments were longer then ten years. When such a sentence was decided, many people felt
relief because in many cases there was a possibility that they could have had a worse sentence,
the death penalty. 24
Prisons and working camps in Czechoslovakia
Let’s focus shortly on which prisons and working camps the prisoners could be sent to after
their trials. The Czechoslovakian prison system was specific with the uranium working camps,
which were located near Slavkov and Příbram, but the most popular place for these camps was
Jáchymov. These areas are located mainly in Northern Bohemia excluding Příbram in Middle
Bohemia. The conditions here were really cruel. The prisoners worked in the uranium mines
where they were exposed to the dangerous radioactivity. Work was hard and there was a high
danger of getting injured. The food was not adequate. Prisoners’ lives were also complicated
by the natural conditions because in winter the temperatures dropped well below freezing in
some of the camps. In 1953 there were almost 15,000 prisoners, which was nearly half the total
number of people imprisoned in Czechoslovakia at that time.
What did these camps look like? For example, the camps at Jáchymov were surrounded with
two rows of fencing 2.5 meters high with barbed wire. In between the inner and outer fence
there was a space of about 1 – 1.5 meters wide tilled with white sand on which the potential
24 “They were suggesting the death penalty for me at the end of my indictment, the absolute punishment. So to tell you
the truth one was really happy when one got eighteen years.” – see the interview with Zdeněk Kovařík.
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