Miloslav Vlk

“At the end of our shift, there were four people missing. One of them had come to me earlier, he used to be a lieutenant at the army, and said to me: ‘I will not explain anything, I’ll just say goodbye.’ I didn’t ask. Who would think that they are going to do something like that? They built a bunker somewhere in the working area and hid there. We were lined up and the four were missing. We waited a little more to see if they would emerge somewhere. They sent us back to the area and when we all came back, the four were still missing. So they sent us back to the camp but the guards knew the fugitives were hidden somewhere so they stayed at the watchtowers. It lasted about two or three days and then the boys decided to leave the bunker. But they didn’t expect that the guards would be still on the watch, so the shooting began. None of them were killed, but there were serious injuries. They also got much harder sentences after that. For attempted escape, the penalty was usually 18 years.”

“I was permitted to send a letter once every three months, sometimes once in two months but not often.” (And were you told what to write?) “No matter what we wrote, it all passed though censorship. They read every letter so you could not write any sensitive information. Amusing situations appeared, for example when a boy was writing: ‘When will I get home? Vis maior.’ And they immediately called him to explain who major Vis was. Of cause they had no idea what it meant. Another prisoner was writing home: ‘Put the Shakespeare somewhere where it doesn’t get destroyed.’ So they asked him to explain who Shakespeare was and what was he planning to do with him. It sounds funny but things like that really happened.”

“I was born on the 14th of December, 1925 in Štěkeň. After school I was trained as a construction worker. I finished in 1945 and I joined the national police. I was admitted, passed through the basic training and went to Klatovy to pass the army training. Then I was transferred to the Prachatice district, to Zbytiny, where I served about a year, a year and a half. Then we were called for theoretical training in Protivín castle where we studied law and other things –criminal law and public law. Then I was transferred to the Klatovy district, to a place which is now called Javorná. It is situated between Železná Ruda and Klatovy. That is where I had served until I was arrested.”

“I was transferred from Bory to the Karlov labor camp, where a strange thing happened. The chief commander of Bory, lieutenant Ladman, came and some gipsy prisoner told him that I was snitching for other inmates, which was nonsense. I never did anything like that. So the commander called me back to Bory and told me that I didn’t have to worry if I told him the truth. But I had nothing to tell him, I just said that it was a lie. He got angry and gave me corrective punishment for one month. It was around December and January. It involved half portions and sleeping on a wooden plank bed under a thin blanket. I lost ten kilograms during that month and the skin all over my body peeled off. It was in winter and there was no heating. It was a nightmare but I survived.”

“I also want to speak about the time when I was in prison with people from Lány. Namely, the group of people that was supposed to have planed the assassination of Klement Gottwald. There was also a nephew of Antonín Zápotocký, who got sixteen years, and another one, who was allegedly supposed to have carried out Gottwald’s execution and who got twenty years. Zápotocký’s nephew talked about his uncle from time to time. He said that Zápotocký often came home drunk and that he liked to sleep in the flour box. That was a large wooden chest used for storing flour. He closed the lid, slept there and then he came out of it again. He was also talking about Masaryk and Hácha, who also used to come to the house. He spoke especially kind about Emil Hácha, who had to be towed around in a wheelchair but was always very nice and polite.”

“I remember it said in the leaflet that the communist party was setting up concentration camps and that they were going to take people’s property and things like that. And when I later saw this, I knew it was correct.” (And as a police officer you saw better into the official structures and you knew more than ordinary people?) “First I saw the economic side in which we were also directly involved. It concerned the farms. I saw what was going on and I learned things from the police records. It also involved the supply of milk. But most of all I tried to make people think about freedom and what it meant.”