Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

the Communist Party? Are you a member of the Youth Organisation? Oh, you are not? Well,
only members are entitled to the scholarship.” Later, I had to stop working for the lawyer
because it was forbidden to have servants. I found a job in a factory called Matador then and
made rubber coats.
How did your anti-state activities start?
Well, 1949 came and there was a boy working in the factory who was in prison in 1948. He
did 6 months in prison and wanted to disappear. There was another guy who never said what
he was engaged in, but according to what he did mention, I think that it could have been
Světlana 5 . Both of them were arrested in 1949 and questioned for 2 weeks, but then released,
because they wanted to get more people, I guess. They both decided it was time to disappear.
Because they knew how I felt, they came to ask whether I could help them to cross the border.
I disliked the fact that they started to imprison foreign soldiers, mainly pilots. I didn’t like the
communist regime and was against it. So I agreed, but told them to take me along. I thought
that there would be an army established abroad, like it was during World War II and that I will
take part in fighting.
One of those boys, Ruda, had a girlfriend here, who was in the hospital at that time undergoing
some treatment and so he had to leave without her. They came to meet me at the lodge
and they were three. It was in February. I didn’t say anything to my parents and waited until
they were gone. We went to the wood and in the afternoon, around three o’clock, we were
crossing the border. We got stopped by an Austrian financial patrol 6 who knew me because of
my father. I didn’t know whether they were good guys or bad guys though, so we decided to
run away from them. They were good people, however.
How did you get to Vienna and then to the Western Zone?
We continued walking for about twenty kilometers towards the railway and in one small
village we persuaded a rail worker to put us up for the night at his railway station. He took
me to his office, laid me down on his bed, and went to sleep on the table. He gave us tickets
for the Vienna train and also schillings 7 for the tram. We were still in the Russian zone then 8
and had to be very careful. We caught the train at five and at eight in the morning we were
already in Vienna. We came to the office of the American CIC 9 , and when I reported our arrival
there, everybody was surprised, “How come you are here so early? How did you get here
so quickly?” They thought we would walk all the way there. They received a report from the
border from the financial patrol that the daughter of gamekeeper Hruška with three young
5 Světlana – a resistance group in Czechoslovakia, which was founded by a former partisan chief Josef Vávra-Stařík. It was
founded in 1948 in the city of Zlín that was at that time re-named to Gottwaldov as a tribute to the first working class
President Gottwald. The group was named after the daughter of Vávra-Stařík “Světlana.” There were three men who
were the main leaders: Apart from Vávra-Stařík, there was Josef Matouš and Rudolf Lenhard. From March 1949 until May
1950, StB arrested 400 citizens at the border of the Moravian and Silesian region and also in South and Central Moravia.
The prosecutors, together with StB officers, put the members of Světlana into 16 groups, which were sentenced in 16 trials
during two years, starting in April 1950. Eleven people were sentenced to death and executed, including J. Vávra- Stařík,
Josef Matouš, and Rudolf Lenhard.
6 Financial patrol was in charge of monitoring whether the state and financial borders were respected.
7 Schillings – Austrian currency used at that time.
8 After the War, Austria was divided into four occupation zones in the same way Germany was. This division lasted until
1955.
9 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.
Czechoslovak Political Prisoners 45