Vladimír Hučín

“When they were from me about five or six metre and I could hear their steps as they approached me, their guns ready. I knelt behind a poplar tree. I kept myself close to the ground, knelt in some faeces from the field but I didn’t care. I carefully slid out and opened fire from my rifle. All twenty-one bullets, the first adapted for higher impact. It was not a nice sight, as the gun produces flame when it shoots. The first soldier fell down immediately, the second one returned the fire. But he didn’t realize where I was shooting from so his bullet hit the wall and there was this spray of crushed brick which was not nice for the eyes. The noise was huge and I lost my hearing for a while. There was a volley of shots from his rifle but I was quicker. He fell too. Both were hit by most of the bullets.”

“What was nasty in my view was when they told me they needed to take my blood. They said this was pretty normal, in case something happened to me. But I knew this was far from normal. One day when they took my blood, I realised that when they hit the vein they took out the needle and put other in. They hold me really tight, I just saw corduroys, of unpleasantly yellowish colour. They belonged to a man who posed to be a physician and indeed, perhaps he was a trained doctor. I could not watch it. I fought back but there were more of them. They were rather strong men. I was in a good physical shape, but still I lost and in a while I also lost my sense of time.” – “What was it that they injected in your vein?” – “Some ephedrine substance. The Interior Ministry stated that when they investigated the materials. When they took me to my cell, I didn’t know where I was or what time it was. They hoped I would talk. But they were proved wrong. Apparently the drug reduces restraint, something like this, I am not an expert on these things. But I am told it reduces restraint and I thought this was a very nasty thing to do.”

“I in fact served two sentences there. First that I had to stay there with hard-boiled criminals who would assault an old woman just to take her pension money, kill her, cut to pieces and would do other bestial acts. This was the first sentence that I had to make company with such people. The other was the very fact that I had to be there. What was worst was the fact that they tried to break you with heavy work. And it was serious indeed. Once I even got four disciplinary punishments in a single day, which was a record. No one ever scored that. They kept telling me I was lucky since my sentence was relatively short. If it had been longer, I don’t know how I would have ended up. When I went to the prison, I weighed over 90kg, when I left, my weight was barely 60.”

“My wife became the target of their operation, with the help of an agent. She happened to work at the Kazeta then and was regularly approached by the Secret Police officers who suggested to her to divorce me. They said she was to think about the future of our daughter, the overall profile, what I was and that it was unlikely I would refrain from criminal activity. They did not persuade her. But then, at the end of 1984, one Secret Police officer came up with an interesting plan. They secured help of an agent, a plumber. They gave him the task to befriend my wife, which he did. He was then to invite her into what was a safe house, endowed with equipment to take pictures. They took several pictures while he was with my wife in the flat and they showed me the pictures when they came to see me in prison. They said, ‘Look what we have here. Here is your wife…’ And I can tell you this wasn’t nice.”

“Although I myself was of rather a slight build, I made them so aggressive that they dragged me to the toilets. I could not prevent it. There were many of them. There they took out scissors to cut my hair. They tossed me around so fiercely that I hit the toilet bowl with my head and it broke. I fought back and as I tried to break free, I hit the bowl with my head and it broke indeed, I had a huge scar, my tooth was broken… but you don’t really feel it. They took me by surprise, I was bleeding from my nose, there was this blow, a slap on face, now the hair… After a while I managed to drag myself into the corridor and there I lost my footing. It was bad indeed. You can’t breathe, you are bleeding from your nose. They did everything so quickly that I was not able to walk in a stable manner. I lost my footing completely. And then one of them, some Viktor Novák, a major figure in the communist party, says, ‘Shit, I will finish him off!’ I fell, he took the bike stand and tried to hit me with it.”

“I went there in good faith with the intention to buy Kofola lemonade, as I was a teetotaller then, I didn’t drink beer, I didn’t smoke, this was known about me. I had long hair and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt bought in Hungary. As I entered, I realised something important was being celebrated there. There were also Russians from the nearby Libavá military area, representatives of People’s Militia in uniforms and it was already in the full swing, you could see they were drunk already. They all had uniforms and medals. So I made my way to the bar. I didn’t attempt to go into the hall, I didn’t provoke them at all. I just wanted to buy the Kofola soft drink. But I immediately saw that it was bad, because I could see the symbols, the ornaments and I knew it wasn’t good that I went it. I wanted to buy two bottles of Kofola. But as soon as I entered I could see they stopped talking when they saw me. A circle of muscular officials formed around me and they started insulting me. I had two Kofola bottles and I replied that I would like just to walk through with my drink but suddenly I was hit to the ground by one of them. I didn’t know then that it was a chairman of a railway communist organisation. He knocked the Kofola bottles from my hand, took me by my hair, which provoked them, as did my Led Zeppelin T-shirt…”

“I was releasing them at night. The way I did it was that I released a test balloon which flew in a certain direction, because it once happened to me that it flew somewhere but then it returned and the leaflets spilled over my house and I had to collect them from the roof the following morning, but after certain trials and errors I eventually advanced to covering quite a large area of Přerov. One day there was some delegation from komsomol, the Soviet Youth Union, playing tennis here, and they discovered the leaflets ‘Away with the Soviet dictatorship!’ there. Massive investigation followed but they could not find the perpetrator. When I heard this, it motivated me even more.”

“In 1973 I decided that I would destroy a huge poster, the thing which is nowadays called a billboard. The sign said ‘With the Soviet Union forever.’ It happened to be on 21st August in 1973, that is the anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and there was this provocative inscription which was over twenty meters in length; it was a really huge billboard. It was installed next to the machinery factory next to the depot of the People’s Militia – they were a kind of their private army. I thus made two thermite explosive charges, which generate heat – a lot of it when they are ignited – and at night I placed them there with a timer and using binoculars, I watched what would happen from a distance of about 300 metres. As if on purpose, there was nobody around. They were all on duty and I thus somehow sneaked in there, I placed it there and then I crawled back. A man was approaching on the path, and his walk was a bit unsteady and when he was some thirty or twenty meters away from it, the charge ignited and a blinding light blazed there, similar to when you weld something. The thermite immediately develops a temperature of about 2000 degrees centigrade. The billboard structure was destroyed immediately, the soft paper parts caught fire and the iron parts collapsed and this man got scared and he began stepping back and he behaved as if he was the one who did it. The People’s Militia members were on duty nearby, their Volha car was parked there, and members of the auxiliary guard – they were sort of helpers to the police at that time – ran in there and they jumped at him and in my binoculars I could see that within moments… the man was helpless and they were dragging him toward the car and threw him in there as if he was a load of bricks, and one of them hit him, the other kicked him, and they took him away somewhere.”

“I came there and I saw flags which were hanging there and which bore the inscriptions like ‘With the Soviet Union forever, and never otherwise,’ and so on. The pub was full of comrades who were dressed in festive clothes, displaying various ribbon bars on their chests, and when they saw me, the crowd gradually grew quiet. It took me a while before I realized what kind of place I stepped into; nevertheless, I walked up to the bar: ‘Two Kofolas, please,’ and the waiter was staring at me and pointing to me like this, because I wore a T-shirt with a sign in English; something which would not catch anyone’s attention today. Well, my hair was longer, and the people who were celebrating there were already boozed up, some of them were already under the influence of alcohol a lot, and some less, but they were aggressive. A circle formed around me, as if ‘so who are you?!’ I ignored them, I took the change from the waiter, and so on. One of them approached me and reached after my glass with the drink… and it spilled. I didn’t want to let them do this to me, and at that time I practised boxing a little bit, but only a little bit, and so I defended myself, but I was outnumbered and I had absolutely no chance.”