Petr Růžička

"Strange people were coming to me, claiming that they also had a paragraph 100, and pulling wits out of me. One of them said we were going to run away. And I told him that we would escape from prison to an even bigger prison, and that would be the end of it for us. He said he had it ready. I told him I wasn't going with him. They set me up again. When I was a fortnight away from getting out, I was looking forward to going home. My parents wrote to me and visited me. So something absolutely terrible happened. I can't forgive myself for being so weak. They said I had a meeting, two State Security officers from Pilsen from the regional administration were waiting for me. One fat and nice, the other thin and ugly. They pulled a file on me and said that they would lock me up again, that I would get six years in Minkovice, which was a worse prison than Pilsen Bory, there were murderers there. They said they would make it so unpleasant for me there that I might not even get out. The hearing lasted several hours. Then they took out the binding act, put it on the table and told me to sign it, that it was not a bad thing. As I was exhausted and screwed up, I signed it. I figured, what the hell, I'll tell them in a month I don't give a shit, I won't do it. But they worked very smartly, and slowly, they had time, and I became a State Security agent. I took it to mean that if I was covered by them, I would do things that would normally get me locked up, and I did."

"I was told to go to Pilsen and fix some light bulbs in Bory. And the commander also told me that I was good because I had written a request to go to the Rock and Roll Christmas in Lucerna. 'Well, I'll give you a pass,' he told me. The week in Pilsen was nothing. I changed the occasional light bulb or tube. The day before I was arrested, I was fixing some lights on the garage wall at the Bory prison, and I thought to myself, that's terrible, I wouldn't want to go in there. In the morning, they told me I would be taken to Nepomuk, which was a twenty-minute drive. A Škoda came, a strange one, and it was going the other way. I asked where he was going, and he said he had to stop somewhere. He took me to the Regional Directorate of Military Counterintelligence. There was a major... a captain... Ladislav Tichý. He told me I was being interrogated for subverting the establishment, slandering and insulting the socialist regime, and praising the capitalist establishment. He threw a million things at me, and I thought about it. I refuted everything. He told me to say whatever I wanted because they had about ten witnesses who confirmed it. The point was that it was the tenth anniversary of Jan Palach in February. I had a tape recording of the funeral. I was enraged that nobody, but indeed nobody, knew who Jan Palach was. Ten years after such a crazy thing of burning and demonstrating in Prague. I accepted that the guys from Poprad didn't know, but there were guys from Prague, Most, Písek. So I gave them a schooling there. So that's how I messed up."