František Turňa

“And there a car was waiting for me, they took me to the February street to the secret police headquarters. There a fat one informed me that nothing was over yet, and they would watch me. And I had to hand in my passport for example. It was 1986, revolution was in 1989. From then on I was thinking about nothing else but how to escape in any way possible.”

„The second one suddenly started to scream. The man in a suit, who would sit all the time, said „Stand up! You are a soldier! Stand straight. You are charged with treason- with leaking the state secret. The sentence is eight to twelve years. But just to inform you, you won’t come out of the jail alive, you’ll end up in Jáchymov. “He had a 5-minute monologue. In such moments, your whole world falls apart. You understand nothing. I knew what I was in for. I knew, what I was doing for the one and half year in military service. Since then, three weeks have passed, and I didn’t have a reason to talk about it with anyone. I had to deal with something completely different- that I found myself in a foreign environment with foreign people. It was a fight for survival, but in a different sense. If I weren’t an older soldier, I wouldn’t survive. Already then, but due to something else. That’s how the prisons operate. And then suddenly, someone from another world comes in a suit, offers you a cigarette and says „we came to kill you, dear boy. “