Josef Čoček

“They drove me into the basement in the garrison in Valtice. There had been a failure and water had leaked into the basement – it was knee-high. I had to wait there for about eight hours or so before the guys from Prague came and picked me up. For one thing, they got a rebuke because they thought that I had some ciphers sewn into my pants. Before they took me away, they took my clothes and gave me a working overall. Then they drove me to Prague. I later learned from the inmates that the StB agents had their place just across the U.S. embassy and they held me in the basement for two weeks. But I have to say that they didn’t beat me there. Overall, they treated me decently. Then they transferred me to Olomouc and that’s where it started for real. There I was beaten three times a night. I had to do pushups and squats. They wouldn’t let me sleep because they wanted to break you physically. They would lead me to the interrogations blindfolded and the warden would intentionally let me hit an iron bar with my face. At the interrogations, I got beaten up regularly that after about half a year, when I was supposed to go to court, they had to put me in a hospital in Brno first in order to put me back together again, physically, because I was unable to appear in front of the court.”

“Our dead box was actually a litter box and when it was full, it was a little inclined to one side and so I could tell that there was something inside. I would come at night and empty it. In 1951, I managed to do three border crossings to Austria and in 1952, I even did four. But then, they built a third barrier on the border with an electric-wire fence and we couldn’t get over it because I didn’t have any tools with me and later on, the snow had already fallen. Therefore, the next crossing was in May 1953. This time, I was well equipped. I had an isolated pair of wire cutters. It wasn’t that easy to cut through the wire there, because if you cut the wire, a light started to flash right beside the spot where the wire was cut and this alarmed the border guards. Therefore, you had to first connect it via a cable before you could cut that wire. The middle barrier was made up of a fence that was knitted 20x20, a kind of square-shaped formations. You had to cut it. The second barrier was one and a half meters tall. You jumped over it - that was no problem. But you had to be careful because of the mine field. We would rake the ground in front of us with a knife as we walked. We had to be very careful in order to not blow ourselves up.”

“Mírov, Mírov, Mírov. Although I didn’t do anything, I had to go to the rapport of a guy called Bimbo, his real name was Matoušek. He was a bit obese. He was the deputy chief of the prison. I didn’t do a thing but still he’d send me to the pit. I had to spend two weeks in solitary confinement which was basically a tiny room with a little opening in the wall. It was December and the winters get pretty tough there in Mírov. Within a week, I of course caught pneumonia. They took me to the hospital and treated me with aspirin – that was the only medicament they had there. Well, I got a bit better there and then they put me in solitary confinement again. I got ill again and again I went into hospital. The chief doctor, a certain Milotínský, a member of the secret police – like the rest of the doctors there – told me: ‘Mr. Čoček, look, they want to exterminate you and there’s nothing I can do for you besides suggest that you be relocated to a different prison’. But he was humane enough not to send me back to the department but instead to place me with the other elderly and sick. And that’s where I stayed until I was escorted to Leopoldov.”

“In Mírov prison, I got to know a certain Franta Škobis. Poor guy – they crushed his testicles during the interrogation. He became insane. I have no idea how this happened but somewhere he found matches and one day he put a straw mattress on fire. He would dance around it and sing: ‘the fire at the Rhine River banks was burning’. The warders came in and extinguished the fire. One of these dupes poured a bucket full of cold water over me and said: ‘that’s for you, so you’ll not be envious of him’. That’s how I caught the first pneumonia.”