"My father was given a heavy sentence of ten years. He was in Bory where he suffered unbelievably. I used to go there for visits. I saw the horror where they beat them and put them in isolation regularly. Everybody knows what that means. It's a concrete bunker under the ground with no windows, no nothing, just water and bread. So when I went there, it was horrible, painful. Then, after maybe a little over a year, my father went to Budějovice to the regional prison and wrote to us that it was like paradise there compared to Bory. I kept visiting him there."
“I arrived from school and I walked home, it was where the pharmacy and the dental office is now, and the house was full of STB policemen. They made me sit there and they were searching the entire house. Then they took father away. It was in the middle of May. I don’t know the precise day. In early July my stepmother got hold of the wife of the rector of Prague university who worked as a defence counsel, and the trial was held in July. Recently I learnt that altogether there were about seventy people in the group which was organized by my uncle and which was called Borkovec. A person from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said that they divided them into three groups. The court trial was in July in the Pankrác prison. It lasted for a week and during that week we were standing on the staircase in Pankrác and waiting for the lawyer to come out and tell us something and then we would go home.”
“They postponed the verdict to two o’clock in the afternoon. They went with the documents to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and they made the decision there. Uncle was sentenced to death penalty and dad to ten years of imprisonment, loss of property and loss of civil rights although he was supposed to be acquitted. The defence counsel had said this to my father and to me she had said that we would take father home. Now he was listening to the verdict and he heard ten years. It was a blow. It was horrible. I was then going to visit my father in the Bory prison. Horrible. He was being regularly beaten and punished by a ‘correction cell’ – a bunker. It was underground, all in concrete, with bread and water. I remember that during my visit they allowed us to go to the toilet together. I think that they did it on purpose so that I would see that he was peeing blood. I was a young boy. It was horrible. The court sentenced my uncle to execution by hanging and you have probably heard how cruel they made his execution; they let him suffocate. They executed him immediately in November, even before Heliodor Píka. Father was sentenced to ten years, my brother was doing his military service and he was sentenced to one year of imprisonment for nothing, without a reason. They did not have anything on me at that time, but in 1952 they sent me to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions.”
“I kept submitting my application to the university and in the entrance examination committee there was a guy from Brodek who supported me. They sent a totally devastating reference letter about me from Brodek, and Mirek looked at it and he said to the others that the man who had written it was a crook and a drunkard and he asked them to have a look at the seal that was on the letter. The man had not stamped it with the seal of the Communist Party in Brodek, but he used a stamp of Cinema Oko Přerov instead. They accepted it and they admitted me. And afterwards, I was obviously just sitting and studying.”
“We spent some months in Pilsen in České údolí. It was quite unpleasant there, because the barracks had holes in them and snow was getting inside. When we wanted to wash ourselves, we had to cut ice from the river and rinse ourselves a little and we were going to work to the Bory prison.”
Milan Prokeš was born on May 11, 1931 in Zábřeh. The family left this border town after the occupation by the Nazi Germany in 1938 and they relocated to Brodek u Přerova. His uncle Květoslav Prokeš joined the resistance movement during the war and after his escape abroad he fought in Czechoslovak and French units against the Nazis. After February 1948 he organized a resistance group which wanted to overthrow the existing political regime and restore a democratic government in the country through a military coup d‘état. A day before the planned operation he was arrested by the StB and on November 5, 1949 executed in the Pankrác prison in Prague. In relation to this case, Milan‘s father was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and his brother to a one-year prison sentence. Milan was expelled from the university and he spent the following two years in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP). After his return from military service he managed to complete his studies at the Faculty of Medicine at Palacký University in Olomouc and for more than forty-five years he then worked as a dentist in the University Hospital in Olomouc. In 1961 he married Helena Svatošová, and a year later they had son Milan and after another four years their son Tomáš was born. Tomáš emigrated to West Germany in 1987. After the fall of the communist regime, Milan was active in the Union of the Auxiliary Technical Battalions for many years and he also served as a member of its central committee. He was awarded for this by the Cross of Merit (3rd class) of the Minister of Defence of the Czech Republic in 2016. In 2017 he was still living in Brodek u Přerova.
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!
