Adolf Rázek

“When they took me to the Ruzyně prison on 11th April, they requested permission to proceed with interrogation, and they began interrogating me. I was interrogated by certain captain Blaho. The head commander Jan Trkovský stormed in and said: ´How come that the Radio Free Europe broadcast that you were imprisoned and that a house search was done in your home?´ I said: ´I don’t know, I’m being held here, they must know that from you.´ At this moment I knew that we won, that the case now had international publicity and that now it was them who would be in trouble.”

“It was no longer possible to print the Pastoral Letters in the Ordinariate, they had to be printed somewhere else and this was done in the then headquarters of the Catholic Youth organization, which is near the Charles Bridge. At that time it was located on the ground floor of the monastery of the Knights of the Cross; later the Secret Police had their offices there. Pastoral Letters were thus printed there. It was done on a cyclostyle machine, there was no other copy technology available, and then they were distributed to the vicars, who were not conforming to the regime. It must be said that in 1949 the communists made an attempt to break the structure of the Catholic Church by launching a communist Catholic Action. It needs to be said that there were priests who got involved in this plot, and who participated in the structure of the schismatic Catholic Action. The plot failed, it didn’t succeed, but the attempt was there. The health of minister Plojhar was a prime example of this attitude.”

“Out of my will I signed a contract with the Jáchymov mines as a temporary worker for one year. I was aware that when I came to Prague, I would have no chance of getting a job. Even after the year when I came there and began looking for a job, it was not easy, because when I came for an interview, they would say – sure, we need you, but it the job location was in ´Ervěnice,´ that was a power plant in the border region. A week later I got a letter that a more suitable candidate had been selected, which was a more elegant way of saying that I was not trustworthy.”

“Five guys escaped from Adam mine. It was under construction, they went through this valley, and got all the way to Hroznětín, but there they were caught. They had them stand on the road to be able to escort them, and one guy was shot there, probably as a warning to others.”

“Immediately before the coup of February 1948, about a week before, on February 15th or 17th, I was passing through Celetná Street, because our secondary industrial school was in Příkopy. They were unloading military firearms from two trucks there, and they were carrying them to the basement of the headquarters of the Communist Party central committee. It was on the corner of the Powder Tower, across from Repre, there was the central committee of the Communist Party. At that time I was wondering – why are they unloading that? I understood it ten days later, when minister Nosek called in the stand-by regiments, the communist security corps from the border regions, to Prague, in order to be ready to demonstrate the power and determination and to be able to carry out this armed military coup.”

“I felt much freer when I was in the internment camp in Jáchymov than when I was later so-called free after I my release. In the camp we knew who was a nark, a cop, and we thus avoided them and talked about whatever we wanted just among ourselves. We were able to read the Red Right newspaper, we knew which information was true and which was just probable, one could decipher it. But when you were out of prison, you had to be careful with whom you talked, what you talked about, where you talked and how you talked.”

“One's life had no value, one was a mere number. For example, I was a prisoner number A024231.”

“A Gestapo member lived on the street where we lived. One day he brought a postcard to my Dad and told him to be careful. The letter was addressed to the Prague Gestapo office, and it said: ´We know why you keep the windows closed, it will be necessary to alert the authorities to that.´ After the war we learned who wrote it. Our neighbor, who became a fervent communist after 1945, had a fight with her husband, and the husband was shouting this over the fence, over the garden: ´She sent the delation for the Rázek family, too.´”

“I remember one anecdote from the investigation of a case in the 1990s. I questioned one interrogator then and I asked him, ´Why did you make this man learn his statement by heart before the trial?´ He replied, ´I didn’t force him to do anything, I only had him read it repeatedly.´ This example clearly shows you that these people still stubbornly keep the attitudes that had at that time and don’t feel guilty. I have not met a single former StB member who would regret what he had done. Not a single one. And there were tons of them.”