"It was terrible in the interrogation room - it was a cell four and a half steps long and three and a half steps wide. The bed was locked at 6 o'clock in the morning after the wake-up call and not opened until the evening. Under the window, which was high up and I couldn't even get to it, was a table and two chairs, also hinged. But it only swung open when you were well-behaved and testifying. So I didn't expect them to ever open that much. It wasn't pleasant, standing there all that time, twelve hours straight, and when you leaned against the wall, the guard saw it through the peephole and was already yelling at you for wiping the plaster. You had to stand or walk or sit on the poop. And that had to be under the window so the guard could see me. The sleeping position was mandatory. We could only be covered so that our arms and legs could peek out of the blanket. At night they'd come to check. At ten o'clock they turned off the light and then shone a torch inside. When I slept on my side, they woke me up screaming. It was not pleasant, it was terrible harassment."
"We were brought to the court and led by one officer, followed by one convict and again by one officer. The jury was already sitting there. They brought us in, we stood up, and suddenly it started to boil between the jury and the judges. At that time there were still jurors from the people who came in to talk and decide. And they found out that it was probably not good. So they took us away again, and we didn't know why. But when they brought us back there, we stood in a different order. And when the verdict was three days later, we found out that they already knew the verdicts in advance, because they had lined us up according to the years of the verdict. So that's why they had to reshuffle us."
"I used to go swimming from my studio on an island in the Jizera River, it was in June. The studio was closed at noon and I went for a swim. I came back to the studio in a wet swimsuit, wearing a summer dress and summer shoes and that was it. And there was security waiting for me. They did a search of the studio, said they had to write up protocols with me, took me home and did a search of the apartment. From there they took me to what is now the castle in Semily, and there was State Security. There they didn't let me out of the car, they put full leather glasses on me so that I couldn't see. They put someone with me from our group - to this day I don't know who we were with, because there was an officer sitting between us and two in the front, and they took me to Liberec, where there was an interrogation prison."
Hana Dvořáková, née Krsková, was born on 26 November 1930 in Prague. When she was five years old, she moved with her parents to Semily, where her father got a job in a textile factory. She graduated from a three-year photography school in Hradec Králové and then ran a photography studio in Semily. In her twenties, she became involved in the activities of the Semily group ILPKORG 1, which focused mainly on the creation and distribution of anti-communist leaflets and the creation of lists of Communist Party collaborators. This group was also convinced that the head of the Semily hospital, Alois Pluhař, was killing and torturing priests and religious who had been interned in one wing of the hospital by the communist dictatorship as part of the so-called K-action. Some of these priests were brought by the police to her studio to be photographed. The work of the Semily historian Tomáš Chvátal shows that this was a rumour and the interned priests were neither tortured nor killed. They were brought to Semily from other places of internment because of health problems and underwent treatment there. The members of ILPKORG 1 tried to assassinate the headmaster Alois Pluhar, but fortunately they did not succeed. However, the court held them responsible for their efforts. As well as the plans to attack the Communist Party Secretariat and the collection of weapons and explosives. In addition, Hana Dvořáková herself was tried for the then illegal termination of an unwanted pregnancy. During 1952, the police arrested all 28 members of the ILPKORG 1 group in turn and a trial followed, during which they were all sentenced to long prison terms. In pre-trial detention they experienced harsh conditions and violence, which State Security used to force confessions. Hana Dvořáková was then sentenced to 12 years in Liberec, but the prosecutor appealed and she was eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison for treason and for the then criminal killing of a human foetus when she had an abortion. She initially served her sentence in the prison in Minkovice, but only for eight weeks. She underwent an appeal hearing at Pankrác and eventually spent most of her sentence in a correctional labour camp in Pardubice. She left prison thanks to an amnesty in 1960. Meanwhile, her father committed suicide out of despair. After her release, she worked as a photographer in Pardubice. She married and returned to Semily. She died in 2017 at the age of 87.
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