Miloslav Růžička

“I worked hard to achieve a good result. To achieve 100% so that I could write a letter. But they did not admit us the result. When I was returning from the shift one day, we stood at the gate and a driver was mending his tyre. I came up to him and helped him. He bent to me and asked, ‘Do you need something?’ I said, ‘I need a paste for my feet, I have a fungal disease. But mainly I need an English textbook.’ – ‘I can get you that’, he said. He got me an English textbook and left it in the car for me, from where I took it. A teacher who could speak English taught me. The driver game me exercise books too. But once we returned from work and there was a search. They cut the mattresses, searched everything. They even put salt and sugar together, out of malice. And there was an aisle between the beds. And there was a bench. It was where I hid my English textbook – I made a double bottom and put the textbook through a whole. It wasn’t there – shame.”

“I was in a integrating cooperative, did theatre, was a volunteer fireman. And I got in my hands an anti-regime pamphlet distributed by Milada Horakova’s group and it said: ‘We want free election supervised by the United Nations. Send this letter, copy it and send it to the U.S. Embassy, which we will ask for free election. We don’t want communism, we want democracy.’ I received this letter, made copies and send it to people. I met a neighbour, named Jirka, ‘Milda, look, I have received this pamphlet against the regime. And I must either give it to authorities or not. And I suspect that it was written by you. If you confess that I was you, I’ll let it be. If not, I’ll give it to the police, because such is the order.’ I hesitated for a long time, then I confessed. ‘Jirka, be calm, it was me indeed. I sent it to you.’ So I calmed him down. But what he didn’t tell me was that he was himself a member of a resistance. In six months, he was arrested, his house searched by the police, who found the pamphlet. Under interrogation, he admitted that he had received it from me. So they knew it was me who had copied the pamphlet and they arrested me on December 12, 1951.”

"All of us in the shared cell knew what time of the morning they had the executions. It was a rule at Pankrác that executions were from four to six o'clock. They let the dog loose in the courtyard before that. It had a long chain hooked on to some rope, so that it could run up and down the whole courtyard. It made a terrible racket when running, it was impossible to sleep with that going on. As soon as it stopped, we heard footsteps and along they came the for the executions. I had to clean up after those executed. I didn't have a clue at the time that they had executed four people and that one of them was a man I didn't know personally, but whom I had heard much of from my fellow prisoner Ruda Veselý."

"I was born in this house in Vilémov, number forty-seven, as the second child of farmer Karel Růžička. I have a sister four years my elder. I'm nearing eighty-five years of age. I was chosen to be the heir of the estate. My granddad died during the Protectorate, he had owned half of the property, which I inherited and thus became co-owner of the estate of fifteen hectares and twenty ares. Those fifteen ares later caused us to be called kulaks."

"After thirty years of work I could finally retire. I've been in retirement for twenty-two years now. In the meantime I've been active in the CPP. I wrote a book called 'The Fates of the Political Prisoners of Havlíčkův Brod' in 1999, and nine years later I published 'The Exiles'. I'm now putting together the second book of The Exiles which I would like to have done in a year or two. So I'm not lazying about, I bear witness to and search for witness accounts of just how terrible the regime was, that was put into action by primitives and had clever people follow suit."

"I was released from military service in Písek during the February days. I was released after only five months of service, so they didn't even have time to issue me my driving license and they had to send it to me by post. I had no idea at the time, that this driving license would become an important document for me ten years later. But back to the point. When I was on my way to the train station in Písek, I saw communists manifesting there, celebrating their certain victory. I laughed at them and thought to myself: 'You, you went get very far. You're just ordinary plebs, primitives and drunks.' Unfortunately, they got as far as forty years. But on that day I was laughing at them."

"I had no idea what was in store for me. Until someone tapped on my window on the 14th of December 1951, and it turned out to be State Security. 'Open the gate!' I opened the gate and they stuck in two sub-machine guns, rushed inside, hands up and straight away they led me into the house to get dressed, as I was coming with them. So I got dressed and one of them stepped up to me saying: 'In the name of the Republic you are under arrest!' By coincidence he was a friend from my military service in Písek. He had looked after me in the sickbay, after the boys had blanketed me for the fun of it and chaffed my back. I was sent home after five months you see, I didn't have to serve the whole two years. This friend of mine had looked after me, but two years later he joined State Security and then came to arrest me."