Ing. Bohuslav Koutecký

“They arrested me at school in Písek. At first they took me to Bartolomějská Street and then to Ruzyně in Prague, where I spent about a month in detention pending trial. I had been somehow expecting it, because they were already investigating my acquaintances and so I knew from them that I had to be careful because they were after us. It all started with a trifle. We, as cavers, had a shed in the Koněprusy Caves and we used it as our base. All those talks were held there, and we would discuss who would transcribe which document and where we would send it and how many copies we would make. The group of cavers was obviously strongly oriented against the political regime. And in 1971 there was the anniversary of the establishment of the Communist Party, the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Red decorations were everywhere. And above our shed there was a hill where filmmakers were shooting some film from the Middle Ages at that time. It was raining and so they left and they planned to finish the shooting in the following week, and a gallows remained constructed there on the top of that hill. We took a picture with the gallows. And two of my friends commented that although the decorations with the hammer and sickle and stars were everywhere, there were none at the gallows. We thus took a poster which we had on our shed, and we placed it on the gallows and we took a photo of it. A gallows with the numbers fifty and the symbols of the Communist Party, the hammer and sickle. It was a parody on the 1950s when several hundred of innocent people were executed. And then all of us took a group picture at the gallows. Then we took the poster off and we returned it to the shed. And one of my friends had this photo with the gallows and the number fifty and he was showing it in the Koněprusy Caves, but a woman who was an StB agent worked among the guides there, and she secretly took the photo from him and she brought it to the StB in Beroun. They did house searches and they discovered the negative films. We were not in that photo, but we were in the negative films. That’s how they found us. They arrested us and we did not know why.”

„The [invitation for cavers from abroad] was delivered to our ministry of culture and the ministry had to approve it and we received a permit from the ministry. Then we went on an official trip by the ministry of culture. We were going to various congresses in this way. But it was possible to travel only to countries which had concluded this agreement, and it included basically all European countries, including Switzerland. At least one hundred of cavers used this opportunity and none of them has ever emigrated, because there was an informal agreement among us that if somebody fled the country during an official trip with a permission from the ministry, then it would be over for all of us. So if somebody really wanted to emigrate, he would go privately with some tour from the Čedok travel agency and escape during the tour. In 1986 one member of an expedition died abroad when he fell into an abyss. The permits always had to be returned to the ministry after the group returned from their travels. And when the then chairman of the Czechoslovak Speleological Society David Havlíček afterward went to the ministry to return the permits, the female clerks were all surprised that one person had not come back. The chairman explained that the man had died during the expedition and that he was therefore bringing back his documents. And the clerks sighed with relief and said that at least he died and did not emigrate, that would have been worse. So such was the way of thinking of officials at the ministry and we felt so bad about it… What they [the communists] had sown into human souls is the greatest evil which persists even now; this communism in those human souls.”