Vilém Šindelka

* 1929

  • V. Š.:"They would always get me in the evening, and in the morning take me to the prison in Břeclav. I was there until all the interrogation was over. After that I was transferred to Brno." Interviewer: "Was there any physical violence during your interrogation?" V. Š.: "Sure there was. I'm not even mentioning it. Everyone who was there was subjected to it. As for me, I was not slapped so much. What was worse was that I had to take off my shoes and socks and kneel on a chair. They were beating you over the soles of the feet. And then they made you put your leg into a bucket with water." Interviewer: "And this was repeated?" V. Š.: "They were doing it every time when I was interrogated."

  • "There was a corridor with rails, and a shaft was leading up there from that corridor. Inside the shaft there were chutes and ladders which were used for taking the material from the vein. We got into this corridor and climbed the shaft and we were looking for a place which would be near the wire fence. We discovered that there was another corridor leading from this shaft, which was parallel with the corridor below, but running some twenty or twenty-five metres above it. There were two working-places. One was open and there was nothing in it, and we could get in there. The other working-place was closed with a concrete block. We guessed that this working-place led to the fence, to the border. If we reached the surface at its end, we might be able to break through. We were digging under the concrete, taking turns. One of us would always go up there with the gear, hammer and pickaxe, and keep digging upwards. We were progressing by centimetres. Eventually we got out. There was that corridor and a firing zone on the surface. There were two posts. We managed to reach the end of the corridor and we got out onto the surface there. On the other side, there was the post, and then only the firing zone. And there we were already free. All this took nearly a year."

  • "They were already waiting there with cars. They were masked and hidden. They had camouflage uniforms and all this and they were already waiting there behind trees. I already sensed that this was not normal. I had taken my shoes off, and I was thus walking so quietly, that I could not have even broken a twig or anything like that."

  • "After our escape to Germany, the second time we escaped, we crossed the border to East Germany. We were detained there. We were walking a street and there was some taxi driver, or an agent of their secret police, and we kept walking that street and then they surrounded us. Later we learned that the German taxi driver had turned us in. We were held by the Germans before they handed us over to the Prague policemen at the border. These policemen took us to Prague for interrogation. After that they took us to the labour camp in order to let that prisoners know that we had been captured. Then we were in Příbram and in Prague-Pankrác. And after that we were taken to Leopoldov."

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    Zlatkov, 05.12.2011

    (audio)
    délka: 02:54:43
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I held to my principles. I had nothing to lose

Vilém Šindelka before his arrest
Vilém Šindelka before his arrest
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Vilém Šindelka was born in 1929 in Brno-Husovice. He escaped to Austria after the communist coup in February 1948. In the emigration camp (in the American sector of Vienna), another emigrant asked him to carry a sealed letter back to Czechoslovakia. The man was most likely an agent of the Czechoslovak Secret Police (StB), and Šindelka was thus arrested at the border and  sentenced to a life term for high treason and espionage. He attempted escape three times, and he and his friends once even managed to get to East Germany, but were detained. He also planned an escape from the labour camp, Vojna (near Příbram), together with Colonel Pravomil Raichl. He was interned in several labour camps and prisons and in 1955 he experienced a prisoners‘ strike in Leopoldov. He has been subjected to special punishment in correction cells or in solitary confinement many times for expressing his free will. He was not released in any of the large amnesties and was realased from prison  in 1966 after more than seventeen years. He now lives with his wife in Zlatkov near Bystřice near Pernštějnem.