Vladimír Štúr

“When they seated me, I saw a man sitting on wooden bench. Under him there was a puddle of blood, I noticed there was something dark. I asked him: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘My nose just sometimes starts bleeding, that´s all.’ And in a while I knew how the nose started bleeding. That evening, when they transported all of us to the county prison at Špitálska Street, I was also being interrogated. Nobody let me rest or think about the questions they asked.”

Interviewer: “What was the breakout you prepared?” Vladimír Štúr: “It was under one barrack. We were digging an escape tunnel under the building.” Interviewer: “At which labor camp?” Vladimír Štúr: “At Bytíz. That was also very interesting. A Slovak called Franta Zeman and an officer Jožko Komka were punished by the two year sentence for this. Since I had twenty-five thousand Slovak crowns on my account, they seized it. I was acting like if that was just twenty-five crowns. I didn´t send anything to anyone, so I saved a lot. My friends incited me: ‘Go and look around!’ But I protested: ‘Well, I´ll go and they´ll arrest me…’ But I didn´t escape it anyway, because then I was at the bunker before the headquarters in winter for a month, in such a hole.”

“I remember there was one free bed under the window in Jáchymov. I was so excited about it, because otherwise there were triple bunk beds where three men slept above each other. It didn´t come to my mind to ask why nobody wanted to sleep there. Those were very old buildings with many crevices and the wind blew with snow a lot. In the morning when I woke up there was a big snowdrift on my blanket.”

“They used to meet together and pray, but everywhere were snitches, and that was kind of bad. Well, how did they do it? Into each room they put an informer, according to the old Asiatic manner. Also Vojto paid for this. They put him into the condemned cell.”