Fridrich Fritz

“…meanwhile, Mrs. Dudinská, you probably have something written about her in those your records, asked me. She arranged crossing the border for chaplain from Levoča. She managed to do that thanks to one agent Palkovič who was executed then. You know, Mrs. Dudinská's mother lived in Prešov and agent Palkovič stayed in her house for some time. So she asked me to deliver some identity cards, actually counterfeit ones that were made by Martin Hritz. I was supposed to deliver them to some priests to Podolínec where they were centralized. She apparently trusted me, so she offered me to do that and this way I was told that she arranged the border crossing for chaplain Precner. And since that time I had known the system and the way how to reach a foreign country…”

“On July 4, they gave their judgement, so the first one was Martin Hritz. I think Hritz was sentenced to twenty-four years. Vršan was sentenced to thirty and I got twenty years of imprisonment and it continued this way. Then I didn’t notice what the others said. I heard them speaking, but I was still thinking about those twenty years… All I had in my mind were words: twenty and twenty again. I didn’t know if this was the truth or not, if I were dreaming or not. Twenty years.”

“When they had realized that I didn’t want to state in evidence, that I didn't speak the way they spoke, they forbade me to sit in the cell. At first, I didn’t mind it, but later on I realized that it was worse than beating. At five in the morning, when we used to get up, they came and brought black coffee and a piece of bread for breakfast. Then I was walking in the room from morning to evening, from five in the morning to ten in the evening, indeed. I did the same over and over again. I almost got mad. I couldn’t sit down, just in case they brought me lunch, but otherwise I wasn’t allowed to. When I wanted to have some rest, I sat down on the floor, but the guard who was on duty there on the corridor, knocked at the door immediately. I had to stand up and it went this way from December to January and after then even to June. This was the worst experience I ever had in that Prešov, I am sure. Maybe I would get mad, but fortunately I have had five fingers. As I was walking in the cell, I was also saying rosary. That’s what I was doing there.”

“Then I came to that cell. It was a great room, the biggest one in Leopoldov prison. There were about fifty people in one cell. There were no beds in that huge room; there were just some pallets in one mound. We spread those pallets on the floor and we used to sleep that way. Toilet was in the corner of the room. However, those were just four or five containers enclosed with wooden grating or wooden deck. So, the new prisoners were always placed near that toilet and I was there as well. It stank there for the whole night because men used to go there all the time. Fortunately, there was one lamp lighting even at night. On one hand, it was bad that a man didn’t sleep in the dark, but on the other, since there were no corridors between the pallets, if somebody had gone to the toilet without the light, he would have stamped on the others.”

“And then, when the school year was about to finish, probably one month earlier, the State Security forces had occupied the seminary. We weren’t allowed to go out or home, we had to stay there. And it would be interesting for you to hear about the situation in seminary. It influenced us a lot when they had abducted nuns because they cooked for us, laundered everything, and then we stayed alone without them. We did our best to keep the seminary operating as usually. I don’t want to talk about it more. But we definitely knew that if something like that happened once, it would continue. We knew that we had been watched and that the whole seminary had been monitored as well.”