Josef Křivka

* 1933

Underage political prisoners
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    Zámrsk

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    “You were allowed to receive packages. I don’t remember how often… Perhaps once in a month or six weeks, I don’t know. But only if you behaved, obeyed and worked. Permits were needed for everything. If we wanted to smoke, we had to report: ´Number - mine was 2011 - is reporting...´ We had to ask for everything: if we wanted to smoke both inside and outside the institute, if we wanted pens and pencils... They were conducting searches of our desk drawers. If he found a pencil there, he would ask: ´Whose is this?´ – ´Mine.´ – ´And where is your permit?´ I had to show the permit to them. A permit was necessary for everything – for having a muffler, slippers, a tracksuit. They would eventually permit all of this, but a committee of boys was sitting there – they were on the inmates´ overseeing duty, something like the Kapos in concentration camps. These boys were in charge of all that, the wardens did not bother with details like this. And one of these boys would for example say: ´The other day he didn’t follow my orders, his bed is not made properly, he is dirty, he doesn’t clean his shoes, he swears, he’s making fun of us... Try next time. Goodbye!´ And they didn’t allow you to have it. The only thing you could do was to shut up and grit your teeth.”

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    Evenings In The Detention Cell

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    “Have these circumstances changed you in any way?” “What was I to do, I was crying under my blanket and thinking of home. The older prisoners were saying: ´Don’t cry, it will go bust, anyway.´ Well, it did, but we’ve been waiting forty years for that to happen.”

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    How Many Years?

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    “Did you expect the sentence to be so harsh?” “In September 1949, when they were wrapping up my case, the State Police members asked me: ´So how many years you think you’ll get?´ I replied: ´Well, I don’t know…´ ´C’mon, make a guess.´ I said: ´Some three years, five years?´ They looked at each other and didn’t answer. I just guessed, for how could have I known how it would really turn out?”

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    First Experience With Detention And The StB Ways

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    “They put me to a cell in the StB building in Pardubice, and Honza Beneš from Cerekvice was lying there under a blanket – he had attempted an escape from the country. He looked at me from under the blanket and asked me: ´What are you doing here?´ – ´Well, I’m detained here.´ – ´Man, you’ll get a thrashing, what have you done?´ – ´What have I done? Nothing really.´ – ´You gotta tell them everything, or they will give you a beating you’ve never seen in your life.´ The interrogation started the following morning: ´So what have you done?´ Bang, bang – blood started running from my nose. Then they sent my bloodied shirt home to my parents. When I returned, my father told me: ´I can’t believe they’ve sent it! They were beating you, weren’t they?´ I was scared, because I have seen guys being thrown into our cell, all beaten, they had been beating them on the soles, and they were then just crawling on all fours…” “Did they beat you a lot?” “Not that much, but blood was running from my nose more than once. The StB members were yelling at me: ´You wanted to help Petr Zenkl to return to the country!!!´ How was I to know then who Petr Zenkl was? They were pointing guns at us, trying various things, only to be able to claim: ´So that’s what you wanted!´ The gun was not loaded, they would not leave charges in it...”

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    Trial

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    “The citizens of Litomyšl were stepping out and shouting: ´Hang them, let them hang!´ Shouting at me as well… One lawyer then told them: ´Madam, be reasonable, you think we can hang fifteen-year-olds? What are you thinking?´ I still remember it as if it were today!”

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    Litomyšl - byt Josefa Křivky, 25.07.2008

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“My sixteenth birthday in prison, then the seventeenth, eighteenth…”

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Josef Křivka
photo: Josef Křivka
photo: Josef Křivka
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Josef Křivka was born November 8, 1933 in Oldřiš near Polička. With his parents and two younger siblings he grew up in Budislav, where he also attended an elementary school. In 1948 he began with his vocational training as a locksmith in Litomyšl. When he was fifteen, he took part in several activities of an anticommunist group in the village. The activities included intimidating local communist officials, who were involved in bullying small entrepreneurs and farmers. This also involved shooting in the air against a district secretary of the communist party, and Křivka was accompanying older members of the group to a house of another party official, whom they planned to attack and obtain secret information from him However, these activities actually resembled more of an adventure rather than real resistance activity. On September 15, 1949 he was arrested together with his friend of the same age and taken to the State Police regional detention facility in Pardubice. He alternately spent 13 months here and in Chrudim. During that time, the police were investigating the groups´ activities, about which he knew nothing, and neither he was involved in its founding. In the trial with the ´Jánošíks from Budislav,´ as the group came to be called, he was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. As a minor he served his sentence in Pardubice, Chrudim and in an institute for young delinquents in Zámrsk.

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