Ivo Klempíř

“Eventually they came up with a plan that the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which at that time was located at the beginning of Celetná Street, when you walk from the Powder Tower toward Celetná Street, and on the left-hand side there is a corner building Na Příkopě, and immediately behind it there is the cinema Sevastopol. The entrance to the Communist Party headquarters was on the corner of the building. They climbed up through the Sevastopol building. The guys then went to see it upstairs, while I was somewhere by the entrance, watching in case somebody would come and see us there. They discovered that there were some ventilation shafts. They were not chimneys, but ventilation shafts, and they reached from the roof of the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party down to the individual floors. They discovered this, but nothing else. Then it was necessary to find out on which floors and it was located and the layout, which was quite a problem. They should have somehow observed how often they were meeting there, when there is the greatest number of people, and in which room they were. We came up with a crazy plan, which was feasible, but it would have to be done in a lot more professional way by some intelligence agency or by some long-term surveillance and monitoring of what happens in the building. What we were supposed to do was that we were to use a wire or some strings, we have not quite thought about it yet, it was my task together with Balík, and to lower some cartridges or explosives to the correct floors and through these shafts. It was possible to obtain these explosives by dismantling grenades and use them to create one large trinitrotoluene explosive, which – as Tonar believes – would certainly be strong enough to break down a wall and do quite a mess there.”

“Inside those cells, in the housing quarters, there were roughly twenty-eight of us. They would always come and bring a large padlock; everything there was old, from the era of the Austrian Empire, including this properly crafted massive wooden door. We already had a lavatory, and it was a regular water closet and not just some outhouse, and it was surrounded by a wall, and it was thus closed in one corner and there was a door. Apart from that, there were wooden bunk beds and by chance, I got to share one with Tonar. He thus came to me and there was only one available space, which was on the bunk bed below me. I slept on top and he took the bottom bed. In the evening we always had something to talk about with the other guys. And there was always a lot of fun because if twenty-eight people gather somewhere, this is what always happens. It was not like that we would be lamenting that we were in prison, but on the contrary, there was much fun. So if somebody was snoring, they were throwing slippers at him, and so on. In the evening we would make tea and they would always open the faucets - there was a trough for washing in each cell, and the boiler operator would release totally boiling water in there for us and sometimes, there was even steam coming from some of those faucets. We thus all had mess-tins of brewed tea.”