Lubor Chvalovský

“In the early Eighties they [State Security - ed.] came to me and gave me cooperation documents to sign. I started backing out of everything. I never even dreamed that I wouldn’t be able to escape it. When they saw they were in a tight spot, one of them said to me: ‘You probably already forgot the fact that your mother was released from a twelve-year prison sentence, that she can be brought back on trial and that her conditions could improve.’ That was a blow that I didn’t see coming, not even with all my rich experience. I froze, I ‘wheedled’ out a week extra to think it through. That was one of the biggest blows that I ever got to my conscience, my heart, my head. I was placed before the decision to betray everything I fought for, everything I believed in, everything I was punished for. On the other hand there was the fate of my mum. I knew that they were capable of doing anything. That after five years of wartime imprisonment and six years of Communist prison, I would give her another two or three on top. It almost made me break down, I just didn’t know what to do. I said to myself: ‘I’ll ask someone I trust. Someone with a heart, a head, and a conscience, who could tell my his opinion.’ I went to my direct superior in Čedok and told him everything. I wanted him to think it through, but he told me: ‘There’s nothing for me to think about, if you do that to your mum, you’ll hurt yourself in such a way that you’ll never forget it and you’ll never be happy.’ So I went and I signed the agreement. I would like to say here, on my honour and my conscience, that even after signing the thing, I never wrote a single word in any report, I never said a single sentence that would be in concurrence with that which I had committed myself to. That would’ve been betraying my whole family.”

“At a time when I was looking forward to being released from military service, some gentlemen from State Security came to pick me up at my garrison, and they informed the commander there that I was undertaking seditious activities. They loaded me into a car, uniform and all, and took me to the prison in Uherské Hradiště. They locked me into solitary confinement and began the interrogations. They asked about the time when I wanted to leave the country, about my contacts and whether I knew about the ‘freedom train’, which had knocked through the border barriers and escaped abroad. We had heard about it at the time, but we had nothing to do with it. They interrogated me day and night, even about the fact that I had wanted to take my mining suit on my pass time. I was willing to admit to that, but I wasn’t intending to steal it, but exchange it for a civilian suit. But the reason for all this was that they needed to get me into the category of people who have no rights to anything. After two months of complete solitary confinement, once every two days we were allowed walks in the wooden corridor, where two people walked there and back again for ten minutes. I was there twice or thrice with a younger man; we weren’t supposed to talk there, but because we knew each other, he asked me whether I was being interrogated by Mr Grebeníček. And I said: ‘No, I don’t even know who that is, he isn’t interrogating me.’ And he told me: ‘Lick ten for luck then, because you’d be a very unhappy person if he did. I had him about ten times, and I know what that means.’ I only remembered it later on because when the case with Mr Grebeníček came into the news here, the prosecution kept making excuses that there aren’t enough witnesses or materials for a clear conviction. That got my pulse up at the time, and I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Justice, stating that although I wasn’t a direct subordinate, I could testify to what went on there. And I expected to be summoned. I give you my word that no one even replied to me, no one even phoned me.”