Miloslav Bulva

"I didn’t know the two other men who accompanied me in the Pardubice town arrest where I spent one month. Therefore I couldn’t to prove the length of the stay there later on when I was applying for the rehabilitation. I didn’t really mind at the beginning, because it would increase my pension by only 15 Czech crowns. But then they have changed the law in 2005 or 2006, which would pay 2500 Czech crowns each month to all former political prisoners, but the only condition was to prove that you have spent at least one year in the prison. And I’m short just that one month. I have turned my case down to curt, but I have lost the case, so I don’t have any 2500 Czech crowns. Today I have pension of 9400 Czech crowns which is the average of pension these days. I would have to provide the evidence of my former prison - mates. But I didn’t know them. They must be death by now, because when we were in the prison they were already fifty years old. The StB (former communist secret police) doesn’t exist anymore and that’s how I have missed my chance for additional 2500 crowns each month with my pension. I’m very upset about the way the justice treaded me like."

"I have been arrested at the beginning of the year of 1949 while being at some part time job with our school. Some Mercedes 170 came in all of a sudden. They were looking for somebody named Bulva and that’s how I got arrested. This arrest was performed in order to do some short kind of an interview. They collected me at about 10am and they let me go home at about 5 or 6pm. The interview itself took place at the school, in one of the classes. Three StB agents - two men and one woman- were attending the hearing. Mr. Karel Metyš has been arrested already some time ago, I think in Brno town. Of course I was denying, denying and denying. They read - or they even let me read - the passage from the Metyš record. There I have discovered things I didn’t even know about. Like all the things we were supposed to be doing or things I couldn’t know about due to my pneumonia. They just beat it all out of him."

"What I was interested about was the kind of communication between each cell: there were flushing toilets and if you drained all the left over water from the toilet by using the cloth then you were able to talk to the cell above and below yours if they did the same with the toilet. There was a time set up in advance for this occasion, so we knew they will be ready. That’s how we talked to each other. The warders knew about it and maybe they have even listened to our conversation using some toilet, I don’t know, but maybe they really have."

"When we arrived, we were bald, therefore we have been taken for some kind of outcasts among the other prisoners, because in Zámrsk prison only prisoners who ran away used to be bald. The second or third day they sent us to work to shave the turnip. And since we have been so starved from the previous Chrudim town prison, we have cut some turnip for us too and ate it. We must have worked although our bodies weakened due to an insufficient meal servings wouldn’t allow us to even cut the turnip."