Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

straw and we had to stuff our mattresses. We were given covers and mess tins and we had to
hand in our civilian clothes and we got prison clothes. We had no work place yet, because part
of the prison was still being built. So in the beginning our job was to help the men with carrying
bricks. We also scrubbed floors, which were pitch black. There was a madman of a captain
and he used to come in wearing boots covered in mud and he used to say, “Now, scrub it all
again!” We used glass, straw, and cold water for scrubbing the floors. There were about 80 of
us at the beginning. When we had free time, we used to go lie down and chat behind the main
square where grass and apple trees were, and also some vegetables were grown there. That
lasted about a month. At first, they called for somebody to work in the garden, but I didn’t
want to do that. I was at first working in the cable room, then in the sewing room, and then
the cutting room.
In September 1955 there was a hunger strike in Pardubice. What was your experience with it?
That was when I was working in the sewing room and the hunger strike originally started at
the knitting room. We didn’t know who started it and why. It was only later that we learnt that
the overseer at the knitting room was a downright sadist, but we never had to deal with her.
They rushed us to the yard and were surrounded by secret police officers with machine guns
and a ministerial commission came. The girls who started the whole thing were taken to a secret
police office in Pardubice. At that time, there was a change in leadership, Sultán swapped
with Huňáček. When some of the women were taken to the secret police office, Merina and
I, my closest friend in prison, told ourselves that we would start a hunger strike to protest. We
were put into a run-down building, which started to fall down after the “big move” in the summer
of 1955. The hunger strikers were divided into groups of about three and put into cells.
Then, the girls who started the hunger strike came back from the Pardubice secret police office.
All women finished the hunger strike, but I decided to go on. There were three of us in our
cell and it had been seven days already and they made a decision to feed us. Božka Tomášková
went first, but when she learnt that the others had finished the hunger strike, she finished it
too. Then Vendula Švecová went and she tried to fight, but they fed her anyway in the end.
I was the last. When they started to hold me tight, I told them, “Look it’s beneath my dignity to
fight with you. You have an order to feed me, so feed me.” So they put in the feeding tube, put
in the broth, but when they were pulling it out, I threw up all over Ruzyňák, a jailor who was
very meticulous about his uniform. They took me to a cell next to Vendula. All in all, we were
on hunger strike for 2 weeks and we used the Morse code to communicate. Vendula messaged
me that she was unwell. I remember they told us that they would be taking us to the hospital
in Pardubice the following day to feed us through the nose not mouth. I was looking forward
to it because I thought I would shout out what was going on in front of the doctors. Vendula
kept messaging that she was feeling sick. So I messaged her back to start eating and that I was
feeling well so far and would go to hospital on my own. However, she collapsed in the evening
and wouldn’t start eating without me. So I had to finish my hunger strike.
What was the situation with hygiene in the prison? What about washing clothes or having
a bath for example?
There was filth in Kladno, so we did our washing by soaking our clothes in cold water, soaping
it, rolling it, and rinsing it off the next day. The most important for us was to be clean
during the visiting times. We did the ironing mattress style. We slept on the clothes and in the
morning we had creases ironed, skirts and blouses. We could only use cold water. If there was
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