Josef Sejkora

“When I returned from jail, I learnt that my mother had died four years earlier. My father didn’t tell me because it would make me feel even worse. The issue remained open. I didn’t know anything. But the shock after!”

“85% of the people here were communists. They had power and they evicted us for being allegedly unable to meet the economic quotas. A statement of account came. For our district, a certain agricultural expert, Karel Sklenář, was in charge. He was a great guy. He asked the chairman: ´Mr. chairman, you can’t be telling us that this man had been charged with being economically incompetent. You have frozen thirty thousand Crowns in his savings account at the bank, so there must be some mistake here.´ – ´No mistake. This decision has been made by the village council, and there is no appealing it.´ Still, my brother appealed the ministry in Prague. There they told him that he had to go to the authority in his region, to Pardubice, and make his appeal there. In Pardubice they told him in person: ´We know that you are able to prove the things that you wrote in your appeal. But the people do not wish to have you there, and that’s it.´ Meaning that the laws were good for nothing, because now they had their own new laws.”

“In 1948 we took part in a commemoration ceremony for President Beneš in Zelný trh in Brno. The garrison gathered there. I was terribly offended when the army stood there unarmed. A shout was heard from the streets: ´Militia: order, arms!´ It was a shame for the entire nation. For it is the army that needs to be armed in the first place.”

“In Mariánská hora I refused to go down the mine for health reasons. It was a lie, but I was not alone. I was punished for it by having to spend ten days in a correction cell. I spent ten days there, and was then released and told to go work in the mine. ´No! I will work for you, but not in the mine. Let me work on the surface, and I will come to work tomorrow.´ – ´You know that we need people for the mine, not for work on the surface.´ I got another ten days in the correction cell, and so I went there. But while I was in the correction cell for the first time for ten days, I began a private protest and I went on a hunger strike. I managed to keep it for six days. I interrupted it after six days. Such was the daily amount of food. For lunch, you got two dumplings, sauce and soup. Without meat, of course. On other days, there were three hundred grams of bread and water. This was for twenty-four hours. The other time I was in the correction cell for about six days when an order to work came, and they asked my name. I told them. ´I’m not going to the mine.´ You could hear the same reply from several correction cells. ´OK, we’ll talk about it.´ They simply stopped working for ten days. It was pointless, anyway. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to do anything with us. Eventually I let them send me to the mine again. A so-called cultural house was being built in the camp. It was simply a wooden barrack for this purpose, and that’s where we stayed.”