Otto Šebor

“They blindfolded me and took me to a police van which transported prisoners. The back of the van was divided into tiny cells where they locked up the transported prisoners. They put me into one of these cells where you could neither stand up, nor sit, and in this painfully crooked position we set out on the way. I couldn’t see the other inmates who were inside the van, nor did I know where we were going. Gradually, from the talk of the other inmates which the guards tried constantly to subdue, I understood that Kulhánek was among others also on the transport.”

“After I had been for a few days on the third department of the Kartouzy prison - or if you like at the ‘correctional and labor camp’ in Valdice u Jičína – I was taken to the investigation room where two civilian employees showed up and wanted to talk with me. It turned out that they were in fact agency employees of the secret state police (StB). They started to exert very intense pressure on me with the aim of talking me into signing a collaboration agreement with the StB. Of course they promised me lots of things. They said that they needed young people to work for them, people that they could rely on. They told me that I’d be given the opportunity to finish my studies. They promised that if I signed the cooperation, my parents would be released from prison. This was an immensely strenuous pressure that they exerted on me – in particular the part with my parents. The vision of my parents being freed from prison was of course extremely tempting for me. However, I intensively thought about the verity of these promises. After my experiences from the custody in Cheb and from the court prison in Prague, Pankrác, I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that their only goal was to lure me into cooperation with them and that they would promise me anything in order to achieve this. Anyway, they weren’t bound to deliver on their promises later on. You couldn’t trust their promises because there was no guarantee they would fulfill them. The only thing that was certain was the monstrous obligation, the thought that the StB would catch me into its net.”

“I could see from the window that Kulhánek together with another inmate who was part of the group that had just gone on the walk began to climb up the wall in the place where the wing of the prison building reached the roof of the garage that belonged to the prison administration. I was fascinated as I saw the two men climbing up the wall like two apes. They climbed on the rooftop of the garage and ran toward its edge from where they jumped into the treetop of a maple tree that belonged to an alley adjacent to the prison building. They each jumped into a different maple tree, the round treetops being cropped and alive with leaves. You could see how the branches spread out under the weight of the bodies and you could hear the sound of the impact of their hobnailed prison boots on the pavement. Just seconds into this, somebody shouted ‘Stop! Stop!’ and I heard the sound of shots being fired. This is a story which ended miserably for Kulhánek and his fellow inmate. These two men had decided to escape from the prison walls but they had bad luck. Kulhánek landed on the pavement just a few meters away from the commander of the Cheb prison who was just on his way to work.”