Václav Vlček

“I maintained correspondence with several students, from Hawaii all the way to Germany. One student’s name was Josef Strauss. He had the same name as the minister of national defence at that time. He sent me a postcard and I received the postcard – there was a photo of the Brandenburg Gate with the wall. He wrote on the postcard: ‘This is the wall of freedom which our Soviet friends built for us.’ Soon after, three men from StB came to the student dormitory in the evening, and until the following morning they pressured me, repeating words like: ‘The sword of Damocles is hanging over you. Either you will tell us the name of the person who slanders our people’s democratic system, or you will not be allowed to graduate.’ It was ten days before the graduation exams. I had to give them all my correspondence which I had in my room. I did not tell them anything about anybody and to my surprise, the following day the school principal discreetly praised me and assured me that I need not be afraid and that I would be allowed to take the final examination.”

“Dad did not like to remember the Domeček (‘Little House’), where he had spent eight weeks. He said that they were mostly tortured psychically, by threats that their families would be destryoed, and they were being denied sleep. A 1000 Watt light bulb was kept on in the cell for the whole night and the warden was waking them up every thirty minutes. The prisoner had to say his name and do ten knee-bends. All-night interrogation sessions took place on a number of nights. For the rest of his life, dad considered the chimes from the nearby Loreta church repulsive. The psychic terror culminated in a midnight march through the dark Prague, when dad was followed by the prison commander Pergl and Šváb, who walked behind him with armed guns and dad expected that they would shoot him as a run-away. They walked all the way to the ministry of national defence where dad had his office.”