Jan Prüher

“But then the situation started to change, as the communists wanted to gain power, so it started to change for the worse and it all started on 25 February 1948, as I went home from school and I heard the local public broadcast stating: 'The working class dealt with the reactionary elements, as today, Václav Prüher, the director of the Valdice Prison, had been relieved of his duty and imprisoned.' Well, that's how it all started. Fortunately, he hadn't been interned, but the communists just took power and started crushing everything around them.”

“The liberation in the year of forty-five had almost no impact on the prison and its function as an institution, as in the inside things remained the same. As it wasn't a Nazi prison, but a prison for all the 'Czech bastards', so in the inside things remained the same while the world around was changing. The Revolutionary Guards for example, those unscrupulous bastards who... As I witnessed, after Germany lost the war, there were many Germans being held. And at the agricultural yard of the prison, where they would grow vegetables, potatoes and such... The German prisoners were being deployed there, and on one occasion, the Revolutionary Guards captured this kind of a van with those people inside, wearing uniforms – but not the German ones – maybe eight members of the Swedish Red Cross, and those bastards would take them from the van and just shoot them in front of the prison.”

“There was this man who denounced those people who had been serving in prison's administration in the previous years, as well as the wardens, and he didn't manage to get away, so in mid April they would put him into a solitary confinement, but unfortunately his son came to visit him, and as he didn't find him at his usual place, he would run to Gestapo to complain, and the Gestapo came and the first thing they did was to come to the prison to arrest my father, but my father saw them coming so he didn't hesitate and he would run across the yard to a village where this warden had been living and had been hiding in his barn till the war was over.”