Josef Hořák

"It's hard to judge, in that camp it was, if I were to tell the story, to describe periods when there was prosperity and from that prosperity suddenly within an hour came hunger. Within a couple of hours. And it was just that security reinforcements came, mostly from Prague, 60 policemen or more, and they occupied all the barracks, they searched all the food, whatever food anybody had, they piled it in the middle and poured it on. At night we always had these barrels where we would go to the side. There were barrels in the hallway. So with that barrel they poured the food, everything, with the sewage, with the faeces, they poured it to spoil it. Then we had to clean it up and live there and hunger came."

"I was in that painting room, I was there alone once, and a prisoner came to see me, secretly. He saw that I was there. I don't know how he came to see me. Well, he confessed to me that he could hardly bear it anymore, what he was doing when he was stopping the front in the east. He was in Russia, he fled to Russia before the war, joined the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), and then he stopped the front in the east. And the way they did that was they just put them in German uniforms or SS uniforms in those villages and they massacred the population and the children. They executed them, nailed them to gates and so on. That's the kind of atrocities they did."

"They treated us pretty well there, I can't complain because we did a good job. The Russians were happy and the Russians were the main ones. I know we did once when the weather was nice in the summer, so we didn't rush under the ground. How many times they called from the mining tower - the last cage is going down! We knew they'd always let us down. So we were lying there in the sun and one day the Russian came. He came fresh, unfamiliar with the situation, probably from Russia, because he said: odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat. And he says to State Security officer - streljaj! The five people he was supposed to shoot. He says - u menja nevozmožno. I can't shoot. He was used to shoot right away. It was much worse in Russia."

"And I was lucky to have already read the book named Clay-Eva calling London. It was a book from the occupation that described underground activities during the war. How the group worked in the Protectorate also described the situation in prison. So when I was locked up in a room that was about 1.4 at most, 1.2 maybe, and 2.2 meters long... There was the door in a wall that opened for the night, I was lying on the floor, on that door, the mattress was so stiff. The whole time from 6 to 22 hours one had to either walk, not be allowed to sit or squat. Walk or stand. And that's an awfully long time. And that was psychologically very well done. It was no fun. There was complete silence in those solitary rooms, there must have been silence. And sometimes someone couldn't stand it, started yelling there, such a crazy roar, or just moaning. So it added to the awakening of fear and anxiety about what tomorrow would be like. I had all that experience there as a young man, well, and then I resourced from that book. I knew, now you have to eat what they give you, because otherwise you would die it in a moment. Even though it was the first night, everyone had a tight stomach, so I ate the whole dinner because I knew I had to eat."

"I was arrested in February 1953, I was arrested as a driver. The head of the group, it was in Pardubice, Samšeňák, he escaped, it was a job for French espionage. They arrived normally by car, went inside, handcuffed me and took me away. They put me in a cell and that's how it started. A total of four years. So I was still lucky, I say it only to myself, it's not like I'm born under Jupiter in the conjunction of the Sun. So I'm a child of fortune. I have been really lucky many times in my life. And in the end, in the prison, I went through a lot compared to others. Because I was locked up in Olomouc; then I went to jail in Pankrác, then I was brought from Pankrác to Chrudim. Then I was for a while in Pardubice, from Pardubice I went back to Chrudim. And from there to Pankrác again and from Pankrác in a large transport to Jáchymov. And they took me from Jáchymov to Slavkov. At Slavkov, I signed up as a sculptor there. They took me to Ostrov nad Ohří, where I did sculptural work for half a year, I did models for Prague plasterers."