Jiří Wonka

"V roce 1986, jak jsem říkal, 26. května nás zavřeli. Vrátil jsem se za rok. V Hradci to byl ale teror, tam jsem byl devět měsíců, mlátil mě Ivo Vyleťal za výstřižky o Gorbačovovi –tenkrát už se něco měnilo a já jsem si je vystřihl. Začal mě mlátit do páteře a já ochrnul. A jak to bývá, obratem mě trestně stíhali, že jsem napadl dozorce. Ale vzhledem k tomu, že jsem byl stíhaný, tak to odložili, protože jsem byl stíhaný za těžší zločiny, než bylo verbální napadení. Jednou mně zavázali oči, pálili mě cigaretami, házeli mi tam špagát, ať se prý oběsím, a dodali, že jsem svině německá, nebo co to povídali. Poté jsem šel na Ruzyň, ale tam jsem problémy neměl."

"Udělali to tak, že bratra odvedli v železech, vodili ho po městě, matka to viděla z okna. Ať se na vás klienti kouknou, jak vypadá advokát chudých, říkali mu. Strašně ho ponižovali, vodili ho i po závodě."

“I was lying in Thomayer Hospital at the time. The future senator Václav Benda phoned me that he’d been tasked by Petr Uhl to inform me that my brother was dead. So I had to interrupt the treatment. Jiřina Šiklová worked there as a cleaning lady at the time, she sent my mother some kind of tranquilliser pill. I wondered how she’d get through it... She was sixty-seven or sixty-nine years old. She found out about it at the post office in Vrchlabí, when she overheard a conversation of the local clerks: ‘Mr Čáp, here’s a telegram, deliver it, Pavel Wonka died in prison.’ ‘Well, at least it’s over for him now, I mean, he was in prison all the time,’ the other man remarked. To which my mother said: ‘Mr Čáp, what are you saying?’ That’s how my mother found out about my brother’s death. But the worst was when we had to identify the dead body, that was not a pretty sight. The only thing we have left from my brother is a broken, bashed up suitcase covered in sticky tape. That’s all that was left of my brother.”

“Viktor Vaničků, the butcher’s son - and butchers were prominent figures back then - placed fourth at the running race. And although my brother came in ahead of him, the school’s headmaster awarded him the potato medal [a Czech term for fourth place - trans.]. My brother was sad, but he didn’t cry and he said: ‘When I grow up, I’ll fight for justice.’ So we carried that sense of injustice in us since childhood. That’s why my brother and I were strongly connected to each other.”

“They were sadists like the SS, they burnt me with cigarettes. No one would believe it. When I came back from prison, I was checked up by American doctors brought by Jiřina Šiklová. And they said the last time they’d seen something like that was in Nigeria.”