JUDr. Milan Hulík

“Military service made me furious. Then the prosecutorial interview came saying I would go to Sabinov if I talked more. So that made me quite edgy and Petr Goll told me: “But couldn’t we get to the psych-ward if we used our heads?’ I said: ‘How? What would we have to do?’ He answered: ‘Easy.’ He came up with an utterly brilliant idea. Once, there was an alarm, and we both came out naked, just wearing our guns and our belts with pouches. So, they took us the psych-ward. I made it to Prague to the military hospital in the psych-ward where there were fantastic doctors. It was ’68 so I was covered in the hospital bed with newspapers and magazines. I could see how those army doctors, despite being communists, were nice and how they were on my side. Whoever was there in the psych-ward had to speak with them every other day. They asked us if we had suicidal thoughts. I said: ‘Doctor, I don’t like it here, there are so many things going on here.’ He said: ‘Tomorrow we’re having a meeting. Wait here and I’ll come.’ The next day he came and said to me: ‘We’re going to let you out and you’ll be diagnosed with anxious-depressive psychosis.’ I asked him if it would be a problem for me in civil life. He told me that not at all. So, they let me out as a civilian with a blue book which was a huge jackpot.”

“From the time I was a twelve-year-old I went with my mom to visit him in jail. We always prayed that the visit wouldn’t be at noon because the guards would rush off to lunch, meaning our one-hour visits would be cut in half. I had no way of knowing when I was going to those prisons to visit Dad, that one day I would end up being the boss of those prisons after the revolution. It was one of the most absurdities of my life, that one of the post-November functions I had was overseeing the entire prison system which was at the time still the Czechoslovak one. The visits to Dad in jail were pretty dramatic. I was just a kid then and it worried me terribly. They’d bring Dad out, wearing those rags they covered him with; he’d been a heavy guy, but in prison they’d turned him into a skeleton. Sometimes he had tears in eyes. The first thing you did was rush up to him, hug him, kiss him, and then they’d tear you off of him violently. ‘Sit down here!’ They spoke to you like you were a convict, there’s that lump in your throat, you start crying. Once I gave my Dad some chocolate and the guard smacked it out of my hand.”

“I had found out even before the revolution that there had been some Prague congress of lawyers. And that I had been talked about there, that the Prague head secretary of the Communist Party, Štěpán, had said: ‘And then we have such cases like the one of Dr. Hulík who shoots his mouth off and criticizes our regime and socialism in his closing statements.’ Dr. Cilínek told me that Štěpán had called him saying that they had to throw me out of the profession. It was June of eighty-nine, I started laughing, and I say to Cilínek: ‘Láďa, the communists will be out the picture by the end of the year. He said: ‘You always were the optimist, but communism will be here for ten more years.’ Then I had to laugh even more. When at Bory they brought out Štěpán, I asked him: ‘Mr. Štěpán, why did you want me to be thrown out of the profession?’ He said: ‘That wasn’t me.’ He denied it all, that they had wanted to throw me out of the profession. We spent about three hours speaking heart to heart; of course, he blamed everything on Jakeš, he wanted to be somehow… I asked him: ‘Why you, a college-educated man, a docent, why were you with those so-called communist dinosaurs?’ He answered: ‘Because I had information that Gorbachov would fall and that everything would return to how it had been.’ ‘But it didn’t work out for you,’ I said. ‘No, it didn’t work out for me,’ said Štěpán."