“I know most of the story I am going to tell from Karel. We met in 1991 in Prague. We were at a cottage and our neighbor said that there was an article in Respekt about me. ‘Was Zdeněk in jail?’ ˇYes.’ ‘There is an article about him.’ I went to buy the newspaper and there I found that I and Karel are the only survivors of the escape. I wrote to the Confederation of Political Prisoners and obtained his address to Switzerland. I wrote him a letter and he replied sometime in November that we would meet on the second of January in Prague. […] We had an appointment at the Masaryk train station and the recognition sign was the latest issue of Metropolitan, they were on yellow paper. I was there and I saw a tall man coming to me, leather coat, I thought it was a StB officer. But it was Karel and he pointed at the newspaper. We hugged each other and we went to a restaurant to talk about our lives. […] Then he told me that there was a meeting with other political prisoners in Bílá Labuť. Those were the first news I got from the jail. I found out that I was in Jáchymov. I knew about Horní Bříza from my parents, but there I heard things I never even thought of.”
“I always climbed up into the crutches and I was dragging my legs behind me and I got to the other side, then I relaxed a bit and then I went back. I was doing this until I scratched my underarms to blood. Then I wasn’t allowed to get up from bed for three weeks until I recuperated a bit. Then they watched me. At that time I still couldn’t talk, and when I started talking I was stammering.”
“It must have happened in Klatovy – at least what Karel told me – where we were at the StB interrogation. He said that from there, they took me to the hospital. I don’t know where exactly, if I were in the prison hospital from the beginning. The others had no idea where I was taken. … One of the prisoners told me that I was in Bohnice at the psychiatry. When I could move my legs I was taken back to Bory. My parents sent letters to the Ministry asking what happened to me that they hadn’t had any letter for so long. They got a reply, I still keep it somewhere, that I was seriously ill, that I was at Bory in Hospital, and that I wasn’t able to write to them, and they got the permission to see me.”
“My parents obtained a permission to see me in the hospital. I was brought out on the stretcher. Later, my mother told me it was a great shock, that I didn’t speak, I didn’t realize them, I was only laying there with open eyes. So my parents were just looking at me and then it was the end of the visit and they had to leave.”
“After the graduation exam I enrolled for the Air Force Academy in Hradec Králové. It was a very exclusive school, they accepted only hundred and fifty people and there were several thousand applicants from all over the country and from Slovakia. This is just to let you know. I was accepted, so it proves that I was in perfect health condition. After 1948, the communists came to power and of course they persuaded everyone to enter the party. I refused and they refused me in return, and I was dismissed form the Academy.”
“I applied for the Mining University in Ostrava. Meanwhile, we founded a resistance group with a few friends. We began to print anti-communist newsletters and began to distribute them. Now when I look at it in retrospective, I see than it couldn’t end any other way. With more people involved and newsletters distributed all around Ostrava, it was sure we would get caught. But we didn’t realize it then. I found out about these things in 1991. There was an announcement that all former political prisoners should meet at the Czech brewery ballroom in Ostrava-Fifejdy. I went there ass well and the only thing I knew was that by the sentence, which I still have at home, my group was called Vlasta 1. I met a prisoner and he told me he was from Vlasta 1 and so on… When he was finished, there was a group of people around him, who were in prison with him. So I stood up and came to them and said: ‘You are from Vlasta 1? I’m Zdeněk Štich.’ They were all struck. Then they jumped up and began to hug me. After such a long time, I didn’t know anybody. So we sat down and they talked and I talked and there I found out about things that even my parents didn’t know. What we were doing, how we were arrested and so on. It was, I think, the third political trial in Ostrava and we were ten (five?) main suspects sentenced to ten years. I’m the only one from that group, the others passed away.”
“The time when I should go back was coming and my father did a very special thing. We lived at Fifejdy, which was a workers’ quarter. Both my parents had a good reputation. They were respected people so when the women got had an argument, they came to Mrs. Štichová to judge them. And the word of Mrs. Štichová was a law, everybody respected that. … My father prepared an application for a pardon together with a petition. He went around the quarter, everybody knew him, so even the communists had signed. Later, he found out that all the communists who had signed had to explain it to the local committee. (Laughing). How they could have done that and so on. The petition came together with the application. I got a pardon that came about a month before I had to go back to jail.”
Zdeněk Štich was born in 1928 in Ostrava, his father was a trader with wood. After the graduation exam, he studied at the Air Force Academy in Hradec Králové. He was expelled in 1948. He wanted to enroll at the Mining university, but he participated in the distribution of anti-communist information in Ostrava and he was arrested in 1949. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. He does not remember anything prior to 14th October 1951 when he tried to escape in a group of ten other prisoners from camp 12, shaft 14 in Horním Slavkově in the Jáchymov area. The escape wasn’t successful and most of the escaping prisoners were shot or arrested immediately. The two prisoners that managed to escape were eventually caught and shot. Two others were sentenced to the gallows. Karel Kukal and Zdeněk Štich were the only two survivors. They got away ‘only’ with higher penalties. During the interrogation of the escape, Zdeněk Štich was beaten so severely that he suffered a permanent damage to the neural system and he suffers from a permanent loss of memory. The details of his case are still a unknown and so far, nobody was investigated. He died on 3rd April 2013.
