Cyril Žilka

"And so ... because I found out who it was, it was a friend of mine. At least that's what I thought. We were chatting, yeah, he was a lawyer, I don't know what all he did. He was on foreign business, in Prague, on some ... well, some foreign business, because he knew four languages perfectly, that means he was really good. Already in Prague, he was asked to cooperate, and this was passed on to Hradec, where I later read that they met regularly, not only for my sake but also for the sake of the others in the Photochem, to see if we were doing any hostile activities. They met somehow regularly, I don't know if once a month at those... what's the name of the... workplaces, conspiracy rooms. And somewhere else, even, maybe outside, that, in front of some statue, they changed ... I even found the name of the Aesthete in the materials afterwards. His wife also worked in the bank with mine, they were together!"

"That means I was out of a job. And I needed to take part in work somewhere. It took me about six months to get a job at Photochem. But that was preceded by the fact that I knew a lot of people, and I tried with everyone, like, to get some adequate work somewhere. So finally, after those six months, I visited Fotochem too. And there, I didn't even know it yet, the sales manager told me that he had heard that I was looking for a job and that he needed someone to be the planner and balance sheet person for the whole Photochem enterprise. Well, I was finally grateful to this gentleman, or comrade at that time. Well, I learned, coincidentally, that he had that attitude towards me. He was the chairman of the party in that Photochem, which shocked me completely. So he and I ... they accepted me and he was summoned to the Secretariat, he had to justify why he took me there. He defended it, but every quarter of a year or so he had to go or report how I was behaving if I was doing any intrigues ... any anti-socialist intrigues."

“So they chose three boys, and he [the witness is talking about something experienced by Oldřich Jaroš - ed.] said, we didn’t know each other properly. One of us must have been a cop, a stetsec [State Security officer - trans.], but no matter, we looked through the documents. They closed us up in a room, searched us to see if we had any paper and pencils. Only what we could remember, of course I had some paper and a pencil in my shoe. And there, the things one imagined, he was convinced there of what actual horrors can take place. He said, we had the minutes from the interrogations, it was all there in the archives. He even said that there was a piece of paper written by Slánský, possibly in his own blood, where he wrote: Klémo [Klement Gottwald - trans.], none of it’s true, do something! And Kléma replied: You have to do it for the Party.”

“So I did it one more time, I went inside again, and there was a different guard there, an SS man, someone from the front who probably couldn’t fight any more, so he was there with an SMG. Well, he started out at me, calling me a swine and goodness knows what else. I can still feel the bayonet, how he poked me in the back, and I thought it was all over, I put the bread down and hurried away.”

“He was the worst cadre specialist of them all. He died a few years later, but he was terrible. Every office actually had to hang up a sign, a kind of notice: We are all members of the ROH, we greet each other praise work, and call each other comrade.”