Jindřich Valenta

"From the shaft we went through a gate to the camp, where we were so called pocketed to see if we were carrying anything we were not allowed to have on us. We packed two buckets of coal per day for the cell. In the winter, when the snow fell through the holes in the barracks into our beds, it couldn't be enough. So we brought wood secretly from the shaft. We did it by shoving the cut pieces into the sleeves of our torches. There was plenty of it for corridor supports and such. The decent guards would let us in with it. The ones who weren't decent made us dump the load to their room and made fire with it themselves. In this situation, I said to one of them, whose name was Korejec, that I would have him painted on my cupboard so that my children wouldn't come for sugar. It turned into three days in correction."

"Apparently there were guards who joined before the Forty-eighth because of the supervision of criminal elements. They probably didn't take us political prisoners as seriously as other convicts. Smoking was allowed in the cells, and prisoners could buy tobacco called Taras Bulba and papers. Of course, the older guys didn't know how to roll it, so I, a non-smoker, rolled cigarettes for them. But one day they ran out of matches. When the guard came with food, they asked him if he would give them some. Instead, he yelled swear words at them and left. After an hour or two, the door suddenly opened quietly, someone threw a box of matches inside and closed it again. That means one of them must have been sympathetic. But since they were afraid of each other, they must have done it secretly. It was almost a heroic act, because if he had been caught he would have been in big trouble."

"You came to the gatehouse and they put dark glasses on your eyes. Next they led you by the elbow like a blind man into one of the rooms. During the interrogation itself, they took off your glasses. After a while, I wanted to pee. So I had to put my glasses back on and the warden took me to the toilet where I could take them off my eyes again. I peed in the shell, and he stood next to me and watched. I guess so I wouldn´t' want to throw something in the urinal. After they questioned me, they took me to another room where I had to undress and hand over everything I had on me. Instead, I was given a prison uniform."

"I was without scouting for a while. I started going to dance classes. Even though Scouting was banned, I still wore the Scout Lily on my lapel. At that time it was customary for people to join the organizations they belonged to - whether they were political parties or (interest - ed.) organizations. The Scouts had a lily. I danced with a girl called Alena Šímová. She says, 'Are you a scout?' I say, 'Well.' We got together and she dragged me into the illegal troop. What could we do in the underground at our age? We were distributing some leaflets that were against the regime. Then we did, nowadays you could call it crap, but back then it was considered that we were fighting against something. For example, we deflated the tires of the CSAD buses. That was our so-called sabotage."

"When they put us in jail, the older prisoners laughed at us for being taken off the rocking horse. Because as soon as we turned eighteen, they arrested us. There were about fifteen people in our group and we did about 160 years in total."

“An interesting meeting was with the son of the First Republic-minister Bechyně. He had fought on the Western Front, and in prison he met up with an SS man he had fought against in the Sahara. They slept in the same bunk bed, one below the other.”

“They called me to the leader, that would have been comrade leader. And they sent my leader for his coat... The interesting thing is, although I’m not superstitious, they got that right, they chose well. It was on Friday the 13th.”