František Pevný

“I think we were permitted one letter per month, but I tell you, that was terrible. All letters went through some kind of check, which was done by some women. First, they blacked out things they found suspicious. Later they reckoned it wasn’t enough to black it out, so they cut the passages out instead. So instead of a letter I got this kind of... That was really awfully stupid. I only ever received one visit, and that was quite painful to me. Mum and Dad came all the way from the Slovak borders, where we lived, across the whole country to Pilsen. We happened to be digging a track, there were guards with guns all around us. And suddenly I saw Mum and Dad, and it was clear that it was quite a dismal sight for them. And the visit only lasted a quarter of an hour or something. So they came all that way just for a fifteen-minute visit behind bars. For instance, Mum wanted to give me a sweet - she couldn’t. Those were very difficult and embarrassing things. So I think I told them not to come any more, there was no point.”

“I found my way into the so-called correction [solitary confinement - trans.] a few times, for instance, because of my writings. I wrote down some things, when it was possible to meet people who, say, used to be university professors - say, while stripping feathers or something, when we’d sit by the table and talk of various things. So, for example, I’d discover some definitions, and I’d write those down. But that was punishable. Punishable. Truly. If you wrote something and the guards found out, of you went. They wanted us to go stupid. We weren’t allowed to learn anything. Not anything.”

“I experienced one escape. He was a clever boy. We were digging a sewer ditch from Bory, a big group of us. The ditch was to lead a long way away. Of course, they brought us food there, in cans. There was a cottage there. They counted us and stuffed us into the cottage. We were issued the food at the door. Everyone had a mess tin, we got our ration and ate. And one of those clever boys took that as an opportunity. He muddled about there, and then disappeared. The cottage was on a hill, there was a steep slope down with fruit trees on it. And down below there was a highly frequented road. Lunch was over, roll call. They counted us, and suddenly they were missing one mafdo [an approximate of the Czech ‘mukl’, short for ‘muž určený k likvidaci’, meaning ‘man for disposal’ - trans.]. When something like that happened, they nabbed us and took us back to the prison. And then there was a big hunt for the one who’d escaped. But I think that this was from around there and perhaps he’d managed to agree to meet up with someone who was waiting for him at the road. And so he legged it down the hill, into a car, and away.”