Josef Dufek

* 1929

  • “Well, they wanted to get parents into that. In whatever way possible… He was in the attic. They didn’t know. The food, well, I stole it. In the evening, he went and washed, the toilet was in the courtyard, he didn’t have to go anywhere. They didn’t know… Well, they knew, of course, but I wanted to protect them. I didn’t want them to be put into prison. There were so many interrogations about it, they held me the whole day once, and that my mum was arrested, they brought papers all the time, it was like this” (Did they arrest you in 1950?) “No, in 1949, September 22. They came to Boleradice. In the morning, I was just digging potatoes, I pulled the stem and suddenly there appeared two men, they stuck a gun under my ribs, ‘You go with us. Don’t fight back, otherwise we use the gun.’ And I was done. They handcuffed me and down I went. They took me home, searched the house, and then they took me to Brno, to Příční street. Well, first it was the police headquarters and then Příční. ‘What have you done?’ — ‘Nothing’ — They slapped me across my face, ‘We don’t arrest people for nothing.’ And then they took me to Příční street and they investigated me there. They gave me a pencil and a paper and said, ‘Now, write’. — ‘I don’t know what to write’. I didn’t know what they knew or didn’t know. It was only when they started questioning me that I could respond. I could see what they knew or didn’t know. I could not tell them anything, because we had the leaflets and anything and I didn’t know what they had. Whether they knew something else or… It had never occurred to me that I could be turned in.”

  • “First I was beaten. My nose was broken, my elbow bruised as I was thrown off a chair. I had my handcuffs, like always, it was… well and my ribs were bruised heavily as well. When they hit me, I stopped talking to them and they knew they would not learn anything. But they had a different method, one that gets on your nerves. They kept bringing papers, whispered something one to another, you never knew what they were at, or what was happening. This was frustrating, since you had no clue what would come out of them. This was the worst punishment for me. This is what it was. Whenever they managed to solve a case, they were promoted. There were about sixty second-lieutenants and lieutenants. The bastards got promotion for it, there were always three of them, each of them got twenty-five thousands, promotion and they got vouchers and could take their families to a vaudeville, cabaret, and they could enjoy themselves the whole night.”

  • “I did think nothing of it but the other boys, they felt… well, those who were in jail for the first time. This was a commando with hard regime. They said, those in the agricultural commission, that I was to be punished thoroughly, that I didn’t take matters seriously enough, that I made fun of everything, so that I was to be punished hard. So it was a hard regime commando. I used to weed beet, this I could do, but my back ached. There was this red-haired warden, and I say. ‘Shit, I’ll end up in the penal cell, my back aches.’ — ‘Doesn’t matter, don’t be afraid’. And there came boys on the weeding machine. One of them sat on the tractor, on the weeding machine. I tell them, ‘Boys, could you just…’ But they had six lines. ‘And they said, no problem’. They thought it was for me and they destroyed those six lines. The farmer boys were with us. I’ve survived, I’ve survived everything.”

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    Boleradice, 12.09.2018

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Suffering will not break you if you have experienced many things

Joseph as a student
Joseph as a student
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Josef Dufek was born on January 7, 1929, in Boleradice near Hustopeč. He grew up in a farmer’s family and on graduation from the primary school he went to study at the secondary enological school in Valtice. Being knowledgeable about the region near the state border, he was inclined to illegal activities. He used to smuggle people running from Czechoslovakia across the border to Austria. On September 22, 1949, he was arrested and spent eighteen months in custody in Brno. Thanks to his age he was sentenced, for treason, only to four years in prison and served his sentence at the Antonín mine in Zbýšov. As a political prisoner he went to serve his military service with the Auxiliary Technical Battalion (PTP) and went to mines in the Kladno region. On his return he married Hedvika Horáková and together they raised two children. Since he refused to enter the Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) he was imprisoned again. He spent five months in a prison near Mladá Boleslav under hard regime. In 2013, he was awarded, by the Minister of Defence, Vlastimil Pick, a certificate of the participant of resistance against communism.