Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

her in public in front of the whole cell because they didn’t need her anymore. I came back to
the cell and she wouldn’t speak to me. I was thinking, “You signed because you were cornered,
so I can’t condemn you, but I wanted to help you. I hadn’t done it to get revenge. That’s why
I wrote the letter to the Ministry.” About a month later, the Ministry people came to carry out
an investigation, so I explained the situation to them and the prison was probably told off for
letting us sleep on the cement floor, because from then on there was always a mattress. Then it
was Christmas time and I went around the cell to give Christmas wishes to everyone. We always
made some cheerful entertainment at Christmas, because we didn’t want all the mothers to
be sad that they are alone, parted from their children. So we used to organize an entertainment
show. Every year I made a nativity scene out of paper and every year it got confiscated.
So I came to Věra and told her, “Věruška, I didn’t want to hurt you, I wanted to help you.” She
held me like this and said, “Mosquito, thanks a lot because now they are letting me be.”
You have mentioned guards tossing cells, what was that like?
They were carried out mostly when we were at work. Sometimes it was really big. They
ripped straw from mattresses and threw it with jam and sugar all together into one big heap.
Once I was ill and they came to do a search raid. The trouble was that I was hiding things for
the girls in my cell in my bed. Ruzyňák came and he was a scary man. “How come you are in
bed? We came to toss cells.” “I am ill. Do I have to get up?” I didn’t want to leave my bed
because I had all those things that needed to be protected like photos, sweaters etc., under
my duvet. So he told me, “You can stay in bed then. We’ll be decent.” So I covered my head
because I didn’t want to watch it and they were done in a minute.
I heard that there was a “big move” in 1955 in Pardubice. Can you describe what it was like?
Once, they told us that we were going to move. Everybody from the “A” section had to move
to the “B” section and vice versa. That was in the times of Sultán, when he started seeing Jana,
a doctor, in her office. We were told that we needed to move different types of closets too. In
fact, the whole prison was being moved around. We were moving down from the third floor
and were dragging the closets down the steps. The whole building was shaking. All of a sudden
somebody found out that there was a hole on the third floor and it was getting bigger.
They reported it and that was the end of the “big move.” They invited a committee from the
Ministry, which came the following day and they told us to go to sleep wherever we could find
space and nobody was allowed to enter the third floor. So everybody found a sleeping place
with people they knew. Eventually, they found out that the third floor needed to be knocked
down because of disrupted static. Later, they put us into a stable that used to be a storage
room for textiles and moved all the textiles from there to barracks in Pardubice. In the stable,
Vlasta Nováčková found a nest of newborn mice in the pocket of her jacket. Mice crawled into
all our clothes, so we started to hang them up on hooks on the walls.
You met various types of people in prison. Could you say something about them?
For example we lived with vindictive prisoners and they used to say, “If it was up to us, we
would pave Wenceslas Square with your heads.” They hated us. What’s more there were guards
from concentration camps and they met with their former prisoners there. The vindictive prisoners
were sent to Germany in 1955. After 1955, there were only us, the political prisoners in
Pardubice, and later on criminal prisoners started to come in gradually. The murderers used to
say, “We only killed one person, but you wanted to kill the whole nation.” In short, some were
with us and some against us. What was worse were the prostitutes from Ostrava. They spoke
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