JUDr. Josef Plocek

“Then the communists arrested me and I got thirteen years for espionage. I knew the situation in the Catholic Church, so I was sending some letters out to Vatican. At that time, cardinal Beran was interned, the bishops were disappearing one by one… So we were passing this information to Vatican, about what was happening, and it got revealed. I don’t know where, whether in Rome or here. So I was arrested and tried for espionage. It was no espionage. It was informing about the Catholic Church and about the situation in the Catholic church. Besides that, I was involved in activities of the so-called Catholic Action. I have to stress that this Catholic Action was an official movement from Vatican, and the communists made use of it and started a Catholic Action led by their own people. Which means that people were then confused – what is this Catholic Action? Which one is the genuine one? And so on. At that time I was actively involved in this Catholic Action and the result was... There were various groups. We had religion and philosophy circles, where religious and philosophical issues were debated. And they got labelled as an anti-state activity. But I was not charged with anti-state activity. People who were involved in these circles also got imprisoned. I had tens of people whom I knew and who got to prisons because of this Catholic Action, of these circles. There were many of these circles, because they were organized at faculties of Charles University, at the Technical University, but there were also other meetings in student dorms. Which means that there were many of them. And in each of them there were five to ten participants who were learning about these issues. We were instructed to become familiar with Marxism as well. As for me, I have read three volumes of Marx’s capital as a young boy. It was also included in my university curriculum for state economy. Thus basically for the people who were believers it functioned as defence against the penetration of the communist regime and the communist teaching into people’s minds. The communists hated it. They imprisoned tens of students who had been involved in this Catholic Action. This way I got behind the bars.”

“When I was working in the shaft, one day it happened that one prisoner... You see, no mining rules and regulations were adhered to, if someone did not meet his daily target, they simply left him down there for a sixteen-hour shift without food, without sleep. And there was a prisoner somewhere from the Šumava mountains, and he failed to meet this target. He was working on a small shaft sinking, but ´small´ meant it was 80 metres deep below. And he was riding this lift, which was without any railings, and he fell down. Probably because he was tired and did not eat anything and so on. And the pit foreman sent me to go down to pick him up. So I descended in the elevator cage to the stage where he was lying. They put him there, I brought him up to the surface. Even today I still remember one thing which made me uneasy: his skull was smashed, and some of his brains dropped beside his head. And I was thinking, now what am I to do with it? Well, eventually I picked it up and put it onto the stretcher on which he was lying.”

“While in the court trial, I only confessed what I had said before. I remember I admired Franta Valenů very much, because this prosecutor Čížek was ridiculing him. And what I liked about Franta Valenů, or Doctor Valena, actually, was that he said: ´Mr. chairman, as the presiding judge, please caution Mr. prosecutor that he is not supposed to insult me.´ That’s what I liked about it. When it was my turn, I did only this: when the trial was over, I said: ´I accept the sentence and long live Christ the King!´ Why I said this? Because as I learnt, there was another man, a prelate from Hradec Králové, who had also said this. My friends, Catholics, were telling me: ´You were so brave´ and so on. But this was no bravery. I simply thought: I am so humiliated now, you are treating me as a slave here, I will show you. So I said this deliberately, it was not stemming from some inner perfection of mine or from my faith, from my conviction. Perhaps the early Christians, when they were being devoured by lions in the Coliseum, they had a different spirit. But in my case, it was no spirit, I simply wanted to tell them: ´You bastards, if you do this to me, I will do this then.´ And the presiding judge only added: ´Long live,´ meaning Christ, and it was over. But he admonished me not to interfere with the proceedings this way.”

“But on the camp Nr. 12 there was an attempt at escape at that time. A whole group of prisoners attempted to break out. They tied one policeman, took his gun and ran away. But among them there was one prisoner who did not want to escape and who got into this group by accident. So he came back. He told them he had forgotten his hat there, that he had to go back to get his hat, so that he wouldn’t get caught because of that hat. And he turned them in. They began chasing them, the prisoners were already hiding somewhere in the nearby forests, but they eventually all got caught, except for one, I think, who managed to escape. Some were shot on the spot, some were brought to the camp alive, there were about fourteen boys. I did not see it anymore. But after this escape things got a lot tougher and food was cut severely. There were different times. If somebody told you that this and that camp was the worst of all… It depended on the camp leader, on the situation...Therefore at times some bad camp was even better than some of the good camps. So it differed. Of course we were hungry. I remember that in the camp Nr. 12 where I was, ordinary lunch consisted of soup, not a meat soup, but simply some soup and then you got let’s say three potatoes and gravy. The potatoes were not peeled. Before, while we were in the Prokop camp, peeling potatoes was one of our duties. And I remember that in Prokop I acquired taste for onion, and I still like onion even today. We had to go to the kitchen and cut onions there or peel potatoes, and what happened was that when you suffered from hunger, the onion tasted delicious.”