Jaroslav Popelka

"Some people from the ministry came there and took a carload of goods and vegetables, also some flowers and of course they didn't pay for it. I probably have defiance built into my genes, so I told a friend of mine who isn't too afraid either: 'You know what we should do? We should stop that car at the gate and call the police. We should say that they stole it or that they took it wrongfully'. In the end we didn't do it, but for me this was a sort of a starter of my resistance, because I saw those high-ranking people stealing and abusing their positions of power. It was taking place already under communism. Then, the very last moment was when someone stole a large rare plant from a greenhouse and took it away in a car. Flowers were grown in Tuřany. There were a lot of greenhouses. There were also fruit trees. Again, it could have been stolen by one of those bosses. That was the last straw that made me mad, and I began openly to resist the regime."

"I remember that as long as 10 years after February 1948, my father was still repaying the loan for the goods he had bought for the store which we didn't own by then for a long time already. The Communists did this routinely. They took away people's possessions and left them to repay their debts and loans. The shop they had seized was located in the house where we lived. We were crammed in two tiny rooms in the courtyard. There was hardly any sunlight and the conditions were very inadequate to say the least. I remember that once I suffered a mild poisoning by tobacco smoke because my father – after having smoked in one of the rooms – forgot about my presence in the room and left me in that smoke-filled room. I also have another bad childhood experience: Once, some men came for my father. I don't know who they were – if it was the secret police or somebody else. My mom got terribly scared and in a way it stayed with me. At that point, I was either still in the prenatal state or a little kid. Children are connected with their mother and thus they experience things together. This feeling of anxiety stayed with and it really lasted for years. In essence, I've been suffering the consequences of this joyless childhood for most of my life. The tobacco poisoning and the shock when they came for my father and according to my mother he only returned back home after three days all beaten up. At least he survived. A part of my family didn't survive. My uncle was basically beaten to death in custody. Although he returned back home from it, he was but a wreck. As a four-year-old boy, I overheard a conversation between my father and my uncle in which my uncle described what he witnessed in the camp. They thought that I was too young to understand their conversation. But I know that it very much shook me, to learn what people would do to other people."

"My uncle was allegedly arrested for being a member of a resistance group. But the real reason was that he didn't want to join the farms collective. The people living in that valley were the descendants of rebellious peasants who had in previous times fled to the mountains in order to avoid having to serve their former lord. In the valley, they gained a large degree of freedom. They defended the borders, protected the pass through the valley against the Tatars and other invaders and in return they were granted a relatively large degree of freedom. It remained encoded in the very genes of these people, this resilience or firmness of their tempers. So when the Communists came to the valley and wanted to take their fields, they resisted. They took their working tools, their axes and pitchforks and stopped the people who had come to take their field and cows. If just an individual had resisted, he would have been destroyed quite easily. But they all did it all and the Communists left them alone for a while in order to avoid a scandal. But thereafter they subsequently arrested and finished off the villagers one by one. One of them was my uncle who spent over a year in custody. He went mad from what he had been subjected to there and died a few months later. So this was my childhood. An atmosphere of fear, immense poverty and destroyed human lives."

"Under communism, it was a matter of course that the convicts worked. There were several workplaces there. When I came out of custody, I had been wearing my shirt for about ten days and it was very dirty. I was looking forward to get a clean one. I got a clean one and when I put it on I found out that it had belonged to someone who worked with glass wool. There was one Vertex workplace where the boys worked in the production of glass wool. That shirt was full of prickly fibers. After half an hour I took it off and I was glad that I could put on that old dirty shirt, because wearing the new shirt proved to be unbearable. The boys were full of sores, their hands chafed. The food was terrible in prison. They were forbidden to give the prisoners raw vegetables. Apparently the plan was to completely physically wear the inmates out... The main part of the meal was white dumplings, thin sauce, bread and sometimes sweet buns with sweet sauce. That kind of food doesn't contain a lot of vitamins or minerals. I remember my first impressions when I came to camp. The inmates were all gray. They were like a pack of wolves. Gray uniforms, gray faces. Most of the senior inmates had lost their teeth because they suffered from vitamin deficiency because of the poor diet. This is how the people were gradually destroyed."

"They put me in the so-called 'new-comers' house' as they say in the camp slang. It is a house where new prisoners stay for a week or two, depending on the circumstances, in order to get used to the camp regime. They are being taken care of by the camp kapos there. I got into conflict with the kapos there because they would bully the inmates. I told the inmates not to tolerate it. This resulted in a stir among the inmates. They began to protest and to bunch up. When the kapos found out about it, they attacked me in the hallway. I remember that three of them jumped at me and pushed the red emergency button, which was used to sound the alarm in the case of a rebellion. They pushed that button and reported that I had attacked them with a knife. They threw a knife on the floor next to me. When I opened my eyes again – I must have passed out for a moment – I remember that I was staring into a machine-gun barrel, and as I lay on the ground, I saw the teeth in the mouths of the dogs. They threw me into solitary confinement. They accused me of assault, for which there would have been at least an extra year of prison. I waited in solitary confinement for things to come. I was really lucky, because some of the prisoners overheard a conversation of the kapos in which they conspired against me. Thus it was testimony against testimony. Finally, they didn't add that extra year to my term and I got forty days of solitary confinement for attempted mutiny."