"Gustav Husák declared an amnesty in '74 or '75, saying that if emigrants returned to Czechoslovakia, they would no longer be prosecuted. Of course, those who returned were all arrested. For example, there was a mining engineer who had been in Chile for about five years in the copper mines. He said that he was all alone there and could almost forget to speak Czech, and when he heard about the amnesty, he came back, and they locked him up for five years. Such were the fates there. Then there was an economist, an engineer, who gave just a short report to Red Law, quantifying our indebtedness to the West. And they locked him up, and he served, I think, three years. His eyesight was damaged from his detention. The STBs used to go to him in the penitentiary and tell him that if he denied the report, if he corrected it, they would release him. And he said he wouldn't deny anything, that he would serve his time."
"That was a complete novelty in the legal system. It came out in '73, and we both got protective custody immediately. And it was such a loose continuation of my incarceration that I was also required to report to the Public Safety station several times a week. Showing them that I was working, my pay slip and things like that. And I was not allowed to leave my home village of Mohelnice, where I lived, without their permission. And this went on for a year. They could come and search my house at any time without any permission, which they sometimes did to bolster their self-esteem."
"I point out that it was no longer the interrogation of the fifties, no torture in the seventies. It was more like psychological torture. There was light all night in the provisional detention. I know that after I was released from detention, I had problems with headaches and sometimes allergies to light; I had a headache because I didn't know the darkness; I was always in the bright light. I think I was there for eight months. It is known that provisional detention is more difficult and cruel than the actual sentence because there is a person with one or two prisoners in the cell. We walked from the door to the window about eight steps. The penal order was a mandatory one-hour walk to those pens. We called it the calf pen. We looked forward to it. But as soon as the weather was bad, it started to rain, and the walk was cancelled. They revelled in such pleasures when they could refuse something to someone."
“Section n. 1 on the ground floor were ‘politicians‘ [political prisoners]. They marked us with a white stripe on our clothes so that everyone who got in touch with us knew that we were anti-state. That was one issue. Another issue was that we were there all the time. A prisoner would go to work outside the prison. For instance jailbirds worked in Škoda company in Mladá Boleslav, the whole operation was filled by prisoners. And so it was done like this. For example prisoners from Mírov prison often worked here in Mohelnice in a paint shop. They painted electric motors. Well, and of course we were always in the prison. We worked in a basement under us. Copper coils for telephones were manufactured there. They were manufactured in the basement on machines that were very outdated. The result was that the copper wire would often tear during the winding of the coil, so that a prisoner had troubles fulfilling the work standard. And the work standard was used as a basis for disciplinary evaluation at that time. So when the prisoner did not fulfil the work standard repeatedly, he got a disciplinary punishment which was mainly so-called solitary confinement which basically meant a prison within prison. Solitary confinement means that the prisoner is moved from his plank bed to a different cell where he is mostly alone, gets a limited amount of food and he either goes to work from that cell or he even is not allowed to go to work. Well, and then he gets into debts to the state due to it.”
“There was violence by wardens, especially in a solitary confinement where the prisoner was apart from the others. Ten of us lived together upstairs, such things did not repeat regularly, they happened more sporadically there. However, they tried what they could dare downstairs in the solitary confinement.”
“The military service was like a sequel to prison and I do not exaggerate. Because I joined the 74/81 military unit - artillery regiment in Jemnice and I soon found out that eight of ten young men there had been in prison. So it was a punitive unit. It was like the For Love and Gold film. We were normally armed - the Auxiliary technical battalions, so called black barons did not exist anymore - so we were armed but we operated WWII cannons that had been taken from the German army. So we shot the 152 mm howitzer-guns whole two years. And it was crazy and stupid. Basically, it was a sequel to the prison in Bory. Because I could go home on furlough for the first time after fourteen months of military service.”
“They rang at our door and they stormed into the apartment like Gestapo and took us away. We were being investigated in State Security regional administrative the whole day. They announced me in the evening that I could go home and that my flatmate Jan Glonda would go to pre-trial detention and that I could go home but that I would have to make a commitment not to leave Ostrava, to go just to school and not to continue my activities under any circumstances. I promised it to them there and when they let me go, I took the tram directly to [Ostrava] Poruba and I heroically took the train to Olomouc and I visited Joža Valček in Chvalkovice there and I told him straight away what had happened. He of course did not know what to do because we did not know what was awaiting us and what the days would bring. I then returned to Ostrava peacefully and went to school. It took almost exactly a month. I of course went to see Joža Valček several times until that time. Well and then again, they rang at the door again at half past five in the morning and: ‘Come with us!’ And they told me: ’Mr. Janhuba, you did not obey us and you met Mr. Valček and we will keep you here.’ And I started pre-trial detention too.”
Radomír Janhuba was born on 28 February 1954 in Mohelnice. He studied at Secondary Technical School in Olomouc from 1969 to 1973 and he then started to study at Mechanical Faculty of Mining University in Ostrava. He got in touch with illegal Unification Church during his studies in Olomouc. State Security came for him to his flat in Ostrava during first year of his studies in Autumn 1973, it was followed by custody and a court case. Finally, he was unconditionally sentenced for sedition to serve 15 months and to a year of additional protective surveillance. He served his sentence in Pilsen prison in Bory from 1974 to 1975. He joined an artillery regiment in Jemnice after the end of the additional protective surveillance. He worked for South Moravian Waterworks and Sewerage company in Jemnice since the end of the 1970s. He studied at University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague from 1979 to 1985. Because of his “criminal” past, he could not be in charge in the Waterworks company and he could not start working in Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant in the 1980s. He was rehabilitated by court after the Velvet Revolution. He did many different jobs after revolution and he got retired in 2017. Radomír Janhuba was living in his native home in Mohelnice during the time of shooting of the interview (2021).
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
