Ludvík Florián

“They would decide... the management, the chief, that I would be assigned the job of a stone-breaker. So he would send for me and tell me that. And of course I learned about that part of the mine in detail from the boys, from my friends... just everything. So I would tell him: 'You know, I should leave in less than three months so I just wouldn´t go there. I don´t trust myself in such conditions, I could even die there.' - 'So you won´t go there?' - 'Well, I won´t.' - 'To the penal cell'! So I ended up in a penal cell for five days. So in the end, I got to know what the penal cell was. Five days in a penal cell... On the first day, the food was so poor that it wold be hard to describe... they would give you this slurry, just a little bit, I meant to be a soup. No meat at all, one dumpling or some potatoes. That was on the first day, and on the second one, there was no food at all. They would give you just this piece of bread, quite big and this black... we would call it the black sludge, this black chicory coffee, and the story was that there was bromine in it or something like that so the inmates wouldn´t get wild. So they would give me that on the second day. That´s something I can´t forget... why I was telling you that... coming from the camp I would tell myself: 'Well, you have to save the brad for later, till afternoon. Or you will be hungry.' But I couldn´t help myself... I would eat just tiny pieces but after half an hour or an hour maybe, the bread was already gone. And then there was hunger. But it wasn´t like the hunger we would feel outside. As we were quite emaciated back then, we didn´t carry a spare gram of fat, so the body could take from that. That hunger... I would lose three kilos in five days. Like this, I can still remember how was it like. That´s how they would treat us... that´s how it went in the penal cells. If someone would get ten days in a penal cell, that poor fellow... there were also the elderly, the old inmates... and as they would put them in the penal cell, they would often... without anyone knowing, they would die there and then they would be just taken away... Well, that was ugly.”

“They would appoint one of the landowners who had been... how to express myself properly and not to offend him... you see, he just somehow wasn´t good at farming... so they would make him a chairman of the JZD (United Agricultural Coop). And they would start harassing the farmers, they would start to take machinery from them, everything, and when they would go to work the fields they would even tell them: 'Stop it, that field is no longer yours, it had been colectivised.' Such things would start to happen, so there´s no wonder that the farmers, well some of them, who held the land for centuries, inheriting it from their ancestors... that they would protest, that they wouldn´t let it be. And I remember meeting several such farmers later in the camps. They would tell them: 'You are not going anywhere. Those fields are no longer yours.' That was how they would establish the Agricultural Coops, by violence. And we, as young men, just couldn´t stand it. So we would say, 'That just can´t be. We have to oppose this.' So our boys would come up with... SODAN was the name of our group. That meant Skautská organizace demokracie a nezávislosti (The Boyscout organisation for democracy and independence). As most of us were Boy scouts. Both girls and boys. So they would decide to sabotage that somehow. So it wouldn´t work, that Agricultural Coop of theirs. So as they would gather all the machinery... well there was this landowner, back then, who had this really big barn, so they would gather all the machinery there. So our boys, especially Ruda Mrázek, would come up with the idea to set it all ablaze.”