Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

for me from elsewhere, I refused food and stayed hungry for several days. Sometimes the girls
in the cell gave me a bit of their lunch. There were six to eight of us there. They started to call
me “Mosquito” then and people still call me that today. In the cell there was a window, which
was above the table and I used to hang onto the window to have a look at the new people
they brought in. The jailors started to use that nickname too and it stayed with me until these
days.
Were the questionings in Brno much rougher?
There they weren’t playing around. I experienced one really rough questioning when they
banged my head against a table, dragged me across the room, hammered me against a closet
and used whatever they could get hold of. I tried not to fall down. A phone call saved me in
the end. They had to get ready for new arrests quickly. A guard took me to Orlí 10 , where they
put me in solitary confinement. In the early hours of the morning I realised I was bleeding.
I reported to a doctor, but the secret police officers had no time to take me to the hospital like
the doctor ordered them to do. I was pregnant with my American soldier. I was in my third
month and I aborted. They left me bleeding there for three days until I was totally drained.
The whole ward of the prison revolted and requested help for me. There was an old jailor who
eventually helped me and took responsibility for my transport to the Brno maternity hospital.
They saved my life there, but couldn’t save the baby. They treated me really well in the hospital
and let me have anything I wanted. The doctors told me that I had to rest. They then changed
all the interrogators. I was interrogated by a different man who also recorded everything and
the records contained only things that I had already said. Then they handed me over to the
custody of the court.
What was the trial like?
I am telling you it was a farce because the verdicts were pre-arranged by the secret police
officers anyway. My lawyer wasn’t helping me at all because he was assigned to me as a court
appointed defendant. I got a sentence of 15 years for espionage. When I was in custody before
the trial, I used to write letters to one “mukl” 11 and I found out that we were a part of the
same case. He was a driver of the Avia 12 van and he was accused of handing over some documents
to Franta, one of the boys I was crossing the border with. That was the reason for them
to accuse him of espionage. I spoke to his lawyer and we agreed that I would help him in case
he gets mentioned at the trial. During the trial, when he defended himself that he had had no
idea of what had been going on, I put my hand up and said that Franta, the agent-walker had
boasted to me that he had managed to steal some documents from the Avia and, logically, he
couldn’t have known anything about it. The judge looked at me and asked me why I didn’t say
this during the investigation. “Nobody asked me about that. I didn’t know this gentleman, so
perhaps nobody thought we could have something in common.” I answered. The investigators
were baffled and in the end he got only three years.
10 Orlí – a prison in Brno.
11 “Mukl” – someone who was in prison, the word “mukl” itself comes from the abbreviation of – “a man on death row”
(in Czech: muž určený k likvidaci). It was a label given to political prisoners imprisoned by communist or Nazi regimes that
were not supposed to be released and were supposed to die in prisons or concentration camps. Later on, this label started
to be used for all political prisoners.
12 Avia – a lorry.
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