Stanislav Doubek

“The conditions in the prison… In Valdice, they did not even have any cells prepared for the prisoners from the 1st reformative group who were supposed to share prison cells with four or six inmates. There was a large hall instead where they placed all one hundred and fifty of us. One hundred and fifty people on one floor in three-tiered bunk beds, it was bloody cold there because we got admitted in December and in January the temperature dropped to twenty degrees below zero, the windows were broken… well, to put it shortly, it was not warm inside. There were four toilets and four water taps.”

“We climbed the beam to about half of the height of the church and we wrote the name ‘Dubček’ there. The sign remained there for about ten years, because they were all too scared to climb up there. When we climbed up there, we naturally took some alcoholic encouragement before doing it, and thank God, nothing happened to us while we were writing it there.”