Josef Dufek

“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.”