Josef Dufek

“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.”