Jan Petrucha

“[Q: Remember that last week in the labour camp. You had given away all your good clothes with the idea that you would survive the week, and...] It was in the winter. It was minus ten, fifteen degrees in the night, but up to plus fifteen degrees in the day. Everything thawed, turned to sludge, and I was wearing the same kind of shoes that I used to have to begin with back in Prokop, so I had to walk in them for that week... except I didn’t have any rags or anything any more; what I had on my feet was all I had. And I’d put them on again wet in the morning, and we’d start weaving. All of us who were to be released in a few days or within the week. And my release day was Sunday, unfortunately, so I had to be there the whole week. From Sunday to Sunday. And we wove those security fences out of barbed wire for those who worked in the mine. I didn’t even have anywhere to dry those shoes overnight, we didn’t have any heating there. So the last week was almost the worst. It was terrible, I was so exhausted that I thought I wouldn’t live to see the end of it – mentally or physically, the cold, the frozen, wet feet. Constantly, wet, cold. There was nowhere to dry oneself, nor the shoes. So I gave all the good things to my friends and stayed like that without anything... [Q: What did they release you with? With the clothes you were wearing?] No, no, they gave me my own clothes.”

“I experienced February 1948 at the Faculty of Arts. They summoned in the whole of our faculty. We got a slip of paper which said: ‘Failure to attend will be punished by dismissal from your studies.’ There was a lecture, one professor, of Czech I think, he had a lecture, but nothing about politics, not a word, and when he ended, the host stood up and said: ‘Comrades, I received a kind of, kind of leaflet during the lecture, saying I should... I’ll read it to you.’ And he read that we as the Faculty of Arts should collectively join the CPC [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]. ‘And I would put it straight to the vote. Who is against?’ That was something awful. Everyone fell silent, it was a matter of mere seconds, not a word about politics the whole time before, and then he said this and straight up asked who was against. There was no time to discuss it or anything. And so I think five, eight hands were raised. I was one of them, of course. When he saw there weren’t many, he said to his colleague who was sitting beside him, he said: ‘Colleague, count who is for us joining the CPC.’ And we put our hands down when he asked who was for us joining the CPC, and then some Communist raised his hand, one or two there were. And he said: ‘Count how many are against us joining the CPC.’ But that was another ten, twenty seconds more, and people... other boys had recovered, and so they started shouting: ‘Hey, what’s this, what’s this, for, or against?’ And then: ‘Who’s against, who’s for, we can read and we can write. Anyone who wants to join can do it himself, enough of this, let’s drop this, we shouldn’t even be debating it.’ And he was all startled by it: ‘Well, comrades, so I’ll wrap up, and I hope we’ll meet at work...’ Now what? When it ended up like this. A few days later the same man came into our one class with another man and said: ‘You know, that meeting didn’t end up the way it should have. I’m here now so you can decide for yourselves whether to join the CPC. We’ll give each of you the chance to find suitable employment, but those who won’t understand will meet the same fate that met the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, where they either had to flee the country or were culled. You’ll end up the same. You have a fortnight to decide.’”