Josef Dufek

“I did think nothing of it but the other boys, they felt… well, those who were in jail for the first time. This was a commando with hard regime. They said, those in the agricultural commission, that I was to be punished thoroughly, that I didn’t take matters seriously enough, that I made fun of everything, so that I was to be punished hard. So it was a hard regime commando. I used to weed beet, this I could do, but my back ached. There was this red-haired warden, and I say. ‘Shit, I’ll end up in the penal cell, my back aches.’ — ‘Doesn’t matter, don’t be afraid’. And there came boys on the weeding machine. One of them sat on the tractor, on the weeding machine. I tell them, ‘Boys, could you just…’ But they had six lines. ‘And they said, no problem’. They thought it was for me and they destroyed those six lines. The farmer boys were with us. I’ve survived, I’ve survived everything.”

“Well, they wanted to get parents into that. In whatever way possible… He was in the attic. They didn’t know. The food, well, I stole it. In the evening, he went and washed, the toilet was in the courtyard, he didn’t have to go anywhere. They didn’t know… Well, they knew, of course, but I wanted to protect them. I didn’t want them to be put into prison. There were so many interrogations about it, they held me the whole day once, and that my mum was arrested, they brought papers all the time, it was like this” (Did they arrest you in 1950?) “No, in 1949, September 22. They came to Boleradice. In the morning, I was just digging potatoes, I pulled the stem and suddenly there appeared two men, they stuck a gun under my ribs, ‘You go with us. Don’t fight back, otherwise we use the gun.’ And I was done. They handcuffed me and down I went. They took me home, searched the house, and then they took me to Brno, to Příční street. Well, first it was the police headquarters and then Příční. ‘What have you done?’ — ‘Nothing’ — They slapped me across my face, ‘We don’t arrest people for nothing.’ And then they took me to Příční street and they investigated me there. They gave me a pencil and a paper and said, ‘Now, write’. — ‘I don’t know what to write’. I didn’t know what they knew or didn’t know. It was only when they started questioning me that I could respond. I could see what they knew or didn’t know. I could not tell them anything, because we had the leaflets and anything and I didn’t know what they had. Whether they knew something else or… It had never occurred to me that I could be turned in.”