Ladislav Záborský

“Later we were transported to prisons. I was sent to Valdice. People said that it was one of the worst prisons. We were put to solitary cells but they sent two men to one cell. It was small even for one and we were two there. And when your cellmate was a murderer or a thief or something similar, it wasn’t a pleasant situation. There we had to pluck feather stinking of the rest of meat or we were forced to separate lentils from stones though when they cooked for us, they cooked also with those stones. And when we went for a ten-minute walk, we were allowed to go out only in pairs, we could be only two and we couldn’t meet other men, it was really strict. Later, they put me to joinery workshop where I painted windows. Then I belonged to a group of men who cut glass. I had to neaten edges there.”

“Well, they gave me those duds, so nothing was mine, neither name, just a number. He conducted my investigation. And it was really hard because he let me sit under an open window for the whole day. Furthermore, it was in January, he was wearing ushanka and fur coat, drinking hot tea and he even went somewhere to warm up and left me sitting there under the window. It was a miracle that I didn’t fall ill. And when they found out nothing, you know, they used various scare tactics, as I didn’t reveal anything what could be taken as a high treason because actually I hadn’t committed anything like that, they wrote five pages of a really severe protocol and if I hadn’t signed it, they would have slain my wife. We had five children, so I had no choice but to sign. When I did it, they left me in the solitary cell for another five months and told me: ‘Well, you will be given at least twenty years or the rope!’ And they though I would go mad there.

“A lot of churches were built mainly in eastern Slovakia around the year 1968. At that time, during the communism, I made twenty-one Stations of the Cross. Of course, we got round the Visual Arts Committee. We had to do it absolutely secretly. For example, I curved into wood, I etched glass and so on; in total I made stained glass windows in twenty-five old or new churches.”

“… such nice thoughts just like the Holy Spirit had inspired me and dictated those words to me, so I wanted to write them down. I borrowed some soap and soaped the outer side of my basin. I also borrowed a comb and broke one tooth of it. I was afraid that they could catch me. I wrote my poems on the outer side of basin, you know, since it was soaped it glinted in the light under the window and I had only a couple of hours to memorise it because days were short and some of my poems were almost two pages in length. In my opinion, it was a miracle that I managed to memorise it so quickly and word by word. Then I recited those poems every day because I didn’t want to forget even one word and to break their rhythms.”