Adam Repka

“… One Franciscan priest, Jozef Jurčovič from Vištuk, served masses in a mine, five hundred metres under the ground, and I went there to serve as his ministrant. Since I worked in well drilling, the other prisoner operated a machine and I went to the mass. Moreover, we confessed to the priest secretly. Some of the priests didn’t have wine and wafers for the masses. I mean the wafers which were baked without sugar and milk. In prison, there were also clerks from the office of the Czech Archbishop Beran. Their wives sent them baked wafers in parcels so they could exchange them in the prison. We had our own special money in the prison; they were minted only on one side, so they weren’t valid outside the prison. The currency used by citizens outside the prison was called ‘hard’. When some grapes were supplied to the canteen, six of us squeezed them to produce some wine. But only one bottle was good, the rest of it went sour. During every mass we used only a little of it. Some glass tubes from pills looking like snifters were used instead of a goblet. When we found a room without a ‘rat’, where everyone was reliable, we could serve the mass there. It looked as follows: I pretended to play chess, another prisoner pretended to read newspapers and the priest stood on the bed and he served the mass by his memory.”

“Some prisoners tried different ways how to escape from the prison. There is one example. All the waste rocks were transported outside the factory. The factory was fenced and some civilians carried them there. There was a three-shift system of work and the civilians worked the night shifts. A group of prisoners figured out a plan to make a lid and put it on the bottom of a mine car. A prisoner hid under the lid and they poured waste rocks on it until the car was full and sent it among other loaded mine cars. When the waste rocks were poured out on the heap, he fell out on them. Since he wasn’t hurt, he started to run away and some civilians watched him running. But there was a problem, because one prisoner was missing and wardens had to find out how he had escaped to prevent other breakouts. Finally, one of the civilians confessed he saw the escaping prisoner. As a result, they took measures to prevent other breakouts, for example, they constructed some kind of platform for mine cars and the spar pushing them forward had a new sharp tip then to dig the mine cars to their bottoms.”

“When the second elections were due to start and people were expected to express their opinion about separation from the Catholic Church, the leaflets because of which I was arrested were made. They were printed by an official working in the notary office in Bardejovská Nová Ves, where he had a printing machine. Then he and my friend with whom I served in the army distributed them in villages on a motorbike. On Sunday afternoon, after the elections, they came to a pub in Kočín and they asked people what the result of the elections had been. ‘The result in our village is this’- one of them said and he showed them a blank sheet of paper. But there was a chief of police station wearing civilian dress. When they went outside, he came to them and showed his police badge. Then he asked them to show their identity cards and he arrested them. Afterwards, other people were arrested successively. All in all, twelve people were arrested including a teacher, a postman from Bardejovská Nová Ves, and some other ordinary citizens. I was working on a field about two kilometres far away from the village when two State Security members came and told me that I’d had to go with them. They took me to the police station in Kurima. Before I went to the police station, I asked them to go home with me to take my coat, because I was wearing only a shirt. They accepted my request. The rest of my family was working on other field. My mother packed me a piece of bacon and some bread and then I went with them to Prešov.”

“When the prisoners came to execution, they had to stand in a queue; all the corps of the prison guards were present there. Firstly, the prisoner’s sentence was read and then a hangman hung knot over his neck. Meanwhile, he leaned his knee against prisoner’s belly to prevent kicking, then he pushed some button and the bottom dropped under him. In addition, the hangman took prisoner’s head into his hands and broke his neck. The prisoners were executed successively, one after another. The rest of the prisoners had to wait for their own execution. Those who were executed later were under extreme mental pressure. Some of them were so scared by impending death they started to shout loudly….”