MUDr. Milan Prokeš

“I arrived from school and I walked home, it was where the pharmacy and the dental office is now, and the house was full of STB policemen. They made me sit there and they were searching the entire house. Then they took father away. It was in the middle of May. I don’t know the precise day. In early July my stepmother got hold of the wife of the rector of Prague university who worked as a defence counsel, and the trial was held in July. Recently I learnt that altogether there were about seventy people in the group which was organized by my uncle and which was called Borkovec. A person from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said that they divided them into three groups. The court trial was in July in the Pankrác prison. It lasted for a week and during that week we were standing on the staircase in Pankrác and waiting for the lawyer to come out and tell us something and then we would go home.”

“They postponed the verdict to two o’clock in the afternoon. They went with the documents to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and they made the decision there. Uncle was sentenced to death penalty and dad to ten years of imprisonment, loss of property and loss of civil rights although he was supposed to be acquitted. The defence counsel had said this to my father and to me she had said that we would take father home. Now he was listening to the verdict and he heard ten years. It was a blow. It was horrible. I was then going to visit my father in the Bory prison. Horrible. He was being regularly beaten and punished by a ‘correction cell’ – a bunker. It was underground, all in concrete, with bread and water. I remember that during my visit they allowed us to go to the toilet together. I think that they did it on purpose so that I would see that he was peeing blood. I was a young boy. It was horrible. The court sentenced my uncle to execution by hanging and you have probably heard how cruel they made his execution; they let him suffocate. They executed him immediately in November, even before Heliodor Píka. Father was sentenced to ten years, my brother was doing his military service and he was sentenced to one year of imprisonment for nothing, without a reason. They did not have anything on me at that time, but in 1952 they sent me to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions.”

“I kept submitting my application to the university and in the entrance examination committee there was a guy from Brodek who supported me. They sent a totally devastating reference letter about me from Brodek, and Mirek looked at it and he said to the others that the man who had written it was a crook and a drunkard and he asked them to have a look at the seal that was on the letter. The man had not stamped it with the seal of the Communist Party in Brodek, but he used a stamp of Cinema Oko Přerov instead. They accepted it and they admitted me. And afterwards, I was obviously just sitting and studying.”

“We spent some months in Pilsen in České údolí. It was quite unpleasant there, because the barracks had holes in them and snow was getting inside. When we wanted to wash ourselves, we had to cut ice from the river and rinse ourselves a little and we were going to work to the Bory prison.”