Luboš Jednorožec

"[When they arrested me] I was handcuffed but I managed to reach into my wallet and take out the things I had in there – the letter – and stuff them down my shirt because I wanted to destroy them. I managed to sneak them into Bartolomějská Road where, in short, they put me behind bars. They put me in a prison cell. They searched me all over but they didn’t find it. It was there that I first encountered an informer. He was, I think, a major from Slovakia. He began telling me his story... All I could think of though was the letter I still hadn’t destroyed. Of course, with the experience I have today I would have torn it up and flushed it down the toilet. I wanted to burn it but I didn’t know what to use and how to do it. I confided in him and told him I had the letter and needed to destroy it. He came up to me and said: „Listen, what you have to do is ask the prison warden to light you a cigarette and then you burn the letter. He called for the prison warden and said something to him. The warden took him out of the prison cell. After a while, the warden came to get me. They took me into an office where they stripped me and the letter fell to the floor. That’s how I landed myself in it in black and white. The letter was evidence of the fact that I had known about Švestková’s (illegal) border crossing and that amounted to treason."

“One never knows. It was a beautiful starry night. The gatekeeper was sitting on the railing and watching the exact place where I was. As a scout, I had learned that at night you react to the slightest rustle. Even when you’re not paying attention – the warden was gazing at the stars – you look in that direction. So, slowly, I crouched down and lay down on the road. I sneaked across the road right before his very eyes. I came to a fence. A fence of barbed wire. There was a 5m sniper zone there. I had two fences in front of me. I hadn’t expected the fence to be made out of steel and I only had a small pair of pliers. You won’t believe what willpower can do. You suddenly have great strength in your arms and you don’t notice any pain because something keeps driving you forward. You know you can’t do anything else and that your life depends on what you are doing.”

“Those who were in solitary confinement and had access to pen and paper would supply us with whatever we were interested in. Philosophy, the Arts, technical things. You could approach an expert (imprisoned at Leopoldov) accordingly. That’s why secret messages were sent from solitary confinement to communal prison cells and vice versa.”

"There were four of them escorting us again. Two in the front and two at the back. They were taking us to the shaft bottom. The path we were on was S-shaped and I took the advantage of one of it’s bends, jumped off the path and squeezed through a gap between the old and new winch. The thing is, that because of the bend in the path, the wardens at the back couldn’t see what was happening in the front and the wardens in the front never looked back. It was risky but it worked in the end. Once I had jumped into that gap I naturally didn’t know what to do next. Just imagine when I got to the gatehouse – a large square shaped building about 15 meters long and 15 meters wide. The doors and windows were fitted and the windows were so enormous that light penetrated the entire building from all sides. The sniper zone was brightly lit up with light so sharp that I felt as though I was naked in front of a crowd of people. What a rush of adrenaline! I decided it was now or never. I wasn’t going to give myself up easily."

“We read passages of Luboš Jednorožec's letters that he wrote. They were discovered in Hrusice fifty years after his imprisonment there. The letters were addressed to his friends from the Scouts, Zdeněk Širchán and Jůma, and to his girlfriend Olinka. When Martin Kroupa, the author of the recording, read the letters to Mr. Jednorožec, he asked him whether he knew who had written them. “So you found them, did you? Did I write that?!” Laughs. “I don’t remember that at all! Now that you mentioned the blue-and-yellow flag and all that, those were our emblems. We used to go there!” Who were Širchán and Jům? “Jůme. Well, Širchán was - he’s no longer alive. They’re both dead. Širchán was my deputy. He was a very young boy but very competent and his name was Jan Nedbal. His wife is still alive. She used to take part in our outings later on. She still lives in Dolní Liboc.”