Vladimír Drábek

“By chance or by fate I got to operate a crane that moved construction material. But it wouldn’t be me if there weren’t any complications. Once at a furlough, and they were scarce, I finally got home and my dad, who paid great attention to what was going on and waited when the system was going to fall, told me about a program at Free Europe where they spoke about disturbances in the Army in Prague and about the prospects that the political system would at last go to hell. I was very glad about that and when I came back I couldn’t resist not giving a bit of hope to the others, because we were all of the same sort at the PTP, inconvenient for the communist regime, which was different from prison where there were also thieves and murderers. So I believed that I could trust the people around me. Unfortunately it wasn’t so. I ended up at the military police office in Prague. In comparison with the state police in Hradiště, the interrogators at the Prague military police, in attempts to undermine you psychologically, had a bit more imagination and were a little harder. They just illustrated the possible development of my case. Because, in such a sensitive institution as the Army, I spread information certainly not enforcing the esprit de corps, it is not only me liable for the consequences but also the person I got it from. This time I didn’t manage to hide who I got it from. So they arrested me and my father, which left my mother without any income because she was ill.”

“And yet another journey came in my prisoner’s adventures, this time to Bory near Pilsen. There I was for the first time given with what the prisoners get – a number. And of course I will remember it forever, it was 9153. It accompanied me to the other destinations. Compared with Brno, the sanitary conditions at Bory were much better. But the order established by the then head of the prison Šafarčík was really tough and even the tiniest breach of the strict rules was a reason for punishment. Once I was coming back from a stroll at the prison yard… At that time we used to stroll with iron cuffs on the legs connected with a chain. The chain was lifted by an iron string so as not to be dragged on the ground. The prisoner held this string not to bring any dirt back to his cell. What was remarkable was the attitude of other prisoners. Not that they would show any hostility against the state prisoners but there could be felt certain isolation. Soon we were to learn why. Before the state prisoners got to Bory, the guard were telling the prisoners that they compared to us they are honest men because we were the worst criminals who wanted to sell their own country and they described us as the most crooked and corrupted criminals. And these petty thieves deserve credit for discovering that this was just another time they were fooled by the regime and for treating us the way imprisoned people treat other imprisoned people.”

“I – and you have a certain right to judge at the age of eighty – have not lived a useless life. There is also the question of asserting those who made our lives worse. It took quite a long time until I convinced myself that you can forgive them in the Christian sense. It really took a long time but this is how it is and I think it’s right. We never wanted, and we agreed on that many times when there were or should have been trials with people who committed crimes on other people, we never wanted these people to suffer in prison, even though the conditions we had were incomparable with the conditions they would experience. We never wanted that. We wanted someone to say: ‘These were the crimes.’ In most cases it didn’t happen and it’s a pity. Not for us, but for those who are going to lead this society for time to come.“

“I met a picklock, his name was Standa Štibic. He told us that once at the Pankrác penitentiary, he used to be a servant for the latter president Antonín Zápotocký, who was imprisoned as a political prisoner. He must have criticized something too hard, I don’t know, but he was in prison and the mundane works like sweeping and making the beds were conferred to the ordinary prisoners. This is just for illustration… Not that we’d wanted someone to make our plank beds… But the situation of a political prisoner at that time and at our time had fundamentally changed.”

“The workgroup in Třemošná was a mixture of different types. There was a former Wermacht soldier, an alleged collaborator with the Nazis baron von Locke, a Nazi clerk, a student, an RAF pilot, a doctor, a mechanic or a priest, father Půček from Nedašov, an extraordinary man. We were all in the same caste, the untouchables, we all knew it and it held us together. One of our coworkers came and said he had a contact for someone outside with the prospect for escape. Obviously we approved that. It should have been only for us, political ones, we were a smaller group of eight to ten to decide to try it. The night it was supposed to happen we went to beds in our clothes not to lose time with dressing up. It needs to be said that the other prisoners, if they were real criminals or just alleged criminals, who couldn’t have known what is about to happen – when a group of people goes to bed dressed up, with a piece of bread in the pocket and ready to escape – none of them would fall so low as to turn us in and get us into big trouble. But in the last moment, the driver of the lorry, which was supposed to await us at the walls of the factory and take us to the border, got scared and didn’t come. The driver got scared or there were any other obstacles, I don’t know, it just didn’t work out. We were disappointed, but I can’t imagine what would have happened if any of the guards had found out, or even someone at Bory. Certainly, they wouldn’t be happy about that.”