Jiří Lang

"There was a famous so-called Franta Ramus. He was a warder almost two meters tall, wide, a massive guy. And he screamed while being on his duty, so everyone in the prison knew that Franta Ramus was on duty that day. He kept pounding and slamming with that rubber baton also into the prisoners, not only into the wall, the door and the benches. That was Franta Ramus. Then there was such a small dwarf, such a wren. He was screaming all the time, curious about everything, when a person received a document, a letter and had to hand it in, he tore it up. He had such a piercing high voice, so it was the second one. There were those of different natures. When it started with those political prisoners, there were some, such an old group of those warders who favored the political ones or they tried to. When they took us to Zámrsk, it was also quite harsh in the first days, the warders. And suddenly those more intelligent warders, they already felt that they could not treat us like those thieves and murderers, that we have a completely different mentality and intelligence. Because they were mostly students from grammar schools, industrial schools, conservatories, the professions that could not be compared to the others. Although the others have prevailed there so far. Gradually, another group of political ones came there, they were from Prague, then also from Slovakia and other regions, so the political ones began to be there one to one or even more."

"At home, according to my parents, they turned it all upside down. In the room where I was learning, they dumped the whole secretaire on the floor, looking for something, who knows what I had or didn't have. Otherwise, everything in the whole apartment was upside down... I had climbing shoes that were chained with such special spikes for climbers, so they stole them. I had an album of Czechoslovak stamps, on the one hand there were reprinted miniature sheets and on the other hand there were unprinted miniature sheets, because I was collecting stamps in a philatelic and amateur way. So, the stamp albums disappeared. They just took what they liked. I had the military boots that were worn with the riding tights, so they took them up too."

"One from such cruel interrogations for me was when they started saying that I was a Catholic Scout, that I could pray. So they took the office chair, the one with the back rest. 'So, kindly took off your shoes, kneel here on that chair, put your legs through the backrest, and now clasp your hands, you can pray, can't you?' Suddenly they put pencils between my fingers, and one of them started to push the ends of the pencils, as they were sticking out from those clasped hands. And they began: 'So how was it?' This and that and who, what and how... I thought, you bastards! I didn't say a word, I started praying quietly and kept quiet. And they kept doing it until they broke the pencils and some of the splinters injured me between my fingers, because a pencil won't crack just like that. "