“One or two stayed here till the morning and even waited for the kids to wake up. Then they searched the flat. They were looking wherever they could but didn’t find anything. They only found what they were looking for the next day. I guess that they must have beaten him up to have him confess where he was hiding it. So they came for it. They told me: ‘Look what hiding places your husband came up with!’ It was a microfilm roll hidden in one of the feet of the bed that was hollow. Another microfilm was hidden in the head of a doll.”
“Well, then there was the trial in March a year later. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. We had about one minute time to see each other afterwards. We both cried. We didn’t have time to talk. That was it. They took him away and then they let me know that he’s in Jáchymov. After some time, I was allowed to visit him from time to time. The first time I went there, I went alone, the kids stayed at home and I think that maybe my brother-in-law accompanied me. Later, I managed to arrange for someone to take me there by car with my kids. He stayed in Jáchymov for three years.”
Interviewer: "Were you allowed to bring him something? I mean like food?”
J.S.: “Nothing. In Leopoldov, I couldn’t bring him anything. The prison warden told me to leave everything there except for my napkin. They locked a heavy iron gate behind us and we were sitting face to face at a table but it was so wide that we couldn’t even reach each other’s hand. In Jáchymov, I once managed to pass him a cutlet. But only because I was allowed to take my handbag with me. We were sitting at a sort of a window, so I could pass it to him through the window. He hid it in his cap. I hope they didn’t take it away from him.”
“I remember that on the last evening, that agent didn’t have anywhere to sleep, so my husband invited him to come over and sleep at our place. We were waiting for him on that evening for a long time but he didn’t come. We fell asleep and at about half past twelve somebody was knocking on the porch. My husband stood up and walked to the door to let him in. He had his second thoughts about it because it was already too late and how would he get here. He opened the door, he disappeared and they all got inside the flat. They were about seven or eight. The room was crowded with them. It was in the night from 17 to 18 April, 1953.”
Interviewer: "So he was amnestied in 1960?”
J.S.: “Yes, he was amnestied. Those who went to Prague didn’t know till the last moment that they’d be amnestied. They only learned about it in on May 9th, when the presidential amnesty was announced. We didn’t know anything. No one told us that he’d come home. And they didn’t learn about it till May 12th, just shortly before they actually let them go. I remember that he brought us a bag of nougat candies. My mommy was here and she said: ‘Míla is coming’. But he was on probation for the next ten years which meant that he wasn’t allowed to meet anybody or tell anybody about the conditions in the prison.”
Jana Sléhová, the widow of a political prisoner, was born on September 30, 1927, in the family of a wood ranger, Jan Běhal. She became a seamstress and married Miloslav Sléha in 1949. They lived with their two daughters in Řitka near Prague. Miloslav Sléha worked as a lathe operator in a factory that produced aircraft engines in Jinonice. In 1952, he was approached by a colleague who asked him to pass on information about the manufacture to the West. Miloslav Sléha agreed and started to pass photocopies of jet engine designs and manufacturing procedures to a courier named Vlastimil Hájek. He continued to do so even after agent Hájek fled across the border and was replaced by another courier by the name of Otakar Kulendík. However, their activities were apparently controlled by the secret state police. Otakar Kulendík was the first one to be arrested on April 17, 1953. The arrest of Miloslav Sléha followed shortly afterwards. He spent one year in a pre-trial detention cell in a secret operative prison in the Dr. Zikmund Winter Street. After a couple of weeks, he was transferred to another detention prison in the Bartolomějská Street, where he was several times interrogated. He was accused of espionage and sentenced to 18 years in prison by the Higher military court of Prague on March 11, 1954. He witnessed the hell of the Jáchymov prison and was punished by being transferred to Leopoldov prison. As Miloslav Sléha died in 1998, his story was told by his wife Jana Sléhová. She suffered together with her husband during the tough years when he was imprisoned. She had to raise their two daughters on her own. She died on August 20, 2023.
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!
