Zdeněk Adamec

“I had a German language textbook. And I was reading it, and since I had already finished my shift, I was sitting in the room and writing something at the desk. A warden stormed in. The wardens were doing random checks. He snatched the paper out of my hand. That’s it. I got punished by three days in a ´correction´ cell for that, because I was writing something which was not allowed. ´Correction´ meant that you were getting food only every other day, and besides that only coffee and black bread. A warden was guarding me there I think it was before Christmas and this was very interesting: the warden was a young guy and he wanted to talk to somebody. He began talking to me and he said: ´I am so unhappy. When I was doing my military service, they came there and did a recruitment campaign for us to join the police. He applied and as a policeman he was assigned to prison wardens. He said: ´When I see it, I feel so bad about it. I don’t know how to get rid of it.´ This boy nearly started crying. It was simply not his fault. They fooled him, he applied, and that was it. That was my only talk with a warden.”

“Once before Christmas we got drunk. It was before Christmas and we boarded a bus from Štěchovice to Prague. As I was tipsy, I began swearing in the bus, exclaiming that Stalin and Lenin were murderers and criminals. And I was saying some other nonsense, too. Nobody noticed. The people were perhaps afraid or they didn’t notice. But one man was getting of in Vraný, he was some manager or deputy manager of the nearby power plant, and he told me: ´If I knew your name, I would inform the police.´ The driver, a good communist, said: ´They are teachers from Štěchovice.´ That was it. I said: ´Jirka, we are in trouble. Now we gotta wait what will happen.´ Nothing was happening for a week, and about two weeks later I was looking out of the window from the classroom where I was teaching, and I saw two gentlemen with briefcases coming to the school. I knew that that was it. One could recognize that they were from the StB. I quickly ran to Jirka to tell him that they were here: ´So what shall we do?´ ´The one whom they will try to accuse will take all the blame on himself. If it is me, I will take it, and if they press on you, you will take it.´ At first they asked for Jirka and they told him that something had happened on the bus and he said that he didn’t remember anything anymore, and they asked him whether Mr. Adamec had said something. ´No, he was quiet.´ But it was him who had been quiet and I had been shouting terribly. They told him that if Mr. Adamec had said it, he would have been terribly screwed up, because he had already been in prison, and the things that had been told there were serious matters. He told them that he did not remember anything because he had been drunk. The principal then told me that they would summon me to the school authority. They did, but they didn’t proceed further, and Jirka was later transferred to a different school.”

“Jana Horáková, the daughter of Milada Horáková who had been executed, was in the same class with me. I remember there were many things happening. They executed her mother and I remember that some teachers treated Jana very nicely. I even saw professor Smetanová, who was consoling her outside the classroom. On the whole, they treated Jana very decently. Even the principal Hanušová, who was a Party member; she had to be if she was a principal. Or, I don’t know if she was a communist by conviction, but she did behave very well to Jana. For some time, three men would sit in our classroom every day. I don’t know if they were from the StB, but they probably were. And I think there was somebody from the ministry of education among them, too. They were paying attention to what was being taught in the class. And our head teacher was calling Jana frequently on purpose in order to show that she was an diligent girl and in order to help her somehow. I was a close friend to Jana Horáková. When we graduated, Jana Horáková was told that she would never be allowed to study medicine where she sent in her application, and so she eventually ended up as a nurse in the dentistry department of the hospital at Karlovo Square.”

“I was without a job and I was wandering through Prague. As I was walking by the National Theatre, all of a sudden I hear: ´Hello! What do you do now?´ Karel Pecka. I said: ´Well, Karel, I’ll tell you what I do. I am looking for some job.´ ´Come to us then, you will be moving the props.´ I replied: ´That’s a better job than working for the railways, so why not.´ He led me to his boss. In the National Theatre, the position is called a mechanic manager. It was probably derived from the word mechanism, because there were no machines there. Everything was being done manually. He led me to the personnel department. Somehow it came out that I was a former prisoner. The lady in the personnel department exclaimed: ´Oh God, we’ve already got four prisoners working here. This can’t be, because even the President comes here for performances.´ The mechanic manager told her: ´It doesn’t matter. These guys know the job well. They are actually our best workers.´ We were used to hard work in the mines, so we didn’t mind. And so they hired me and I worked as a stagehand.”