Juraj Krupa

“It worked okay for some time, no troubles. Our company commander was First Lieutenant Ondřej Kalaba, whom I have good memories of, he was a very decent man. He knew about it, so he didn’t give me any orders on Saturday. But then one time there was a military exercise and drill on Saturday, which I refused to take part in. The battalion commander sent me to the prosecutor with no big fuss when I confirmed that I insisted on the matter. So the superior officers sent me to the prosecutor, and on Monday morning I was escorted to Brno, where Lieutenant Colonel Dr Tomáš Holomek, the prosecutor, asked me what the situation was, and I saw him stamp ‘custody’ on to my papers.”

“It really is a harsh punishment. It was harsh for me too. It’s a long time. There’s just concrete and no furniture, nothing. Just the toilet bowl, with the wooden seat removed so you can’t sit on it and get some rest. No chair, nothing, just the concrete floor. [Q: So you spent the whole day on your feet?] I stood the whole day. In the evening they brought a straw mattress to sleep on, and you took off the clothes you wore in the day, got changes, and in the morning it was all tidied away again. So it was rough. It was long, having to stand awake those 16 hours. It was tiring, mentally as well. That’s why they do it, it break the person.”

“It was completely dark there, and all I knew was that it was day-time. It was February, and I was cold. Every third day they served normal prison food, which I often returned because I didn’t eat it. The other days I only got the morning ration of bread and then nothing all day long, then the next day the same. The third day I got normal food, but I often returned it. Then the segregation unit chief came in and asked if I was on a hunger strike, and I told him I wasn’t but that I just don’t eat that food. He sympathised with me and even brought me some bread. It lasted ten days, and when the ten days were up, I returned to my cell and went mining in the evening. I went mining for three days, and then [back in the cooler] for another ten. And that repeated. [Q: You always worked until Saturday, when you refused to go...?] I refused, and they always put me in the cooler. So I tallied more than a hundred days in the cooler.”

“Then I decided to make a dictionary, because I didn’t know what to do any more. I had already pondered my childhood and all kinds of things, and then I stopped, and I wondered what next. So it occurred to me that I could make a dictionary. I started from A. A as the conjunction [‘a’ means ‘and’ in Czech - trans.], Ab - meaning father in Hebrew, and so on. I wetted my finger in the water in the toilet and wrote on the concrete floor. I wrote out the dictionary like that. Then the chief of the segregation unit came in and was scared that I had gone bonkers. I told him I hadn’t, that I was writing a dictionary. But you really can go crazy from it.”

“Before every ten days of segregation, they sent me to the commanders. And one of them told me I would give up. ‘I can keep on doing this, but you can’t,’ they would say. One time they even sent a supposed prosecutor. They said I was disrupting the economic plan. I asked in what way I was disrupting the economic plan. Supposedly, I had an economic plan, and I was disrupting it by refusing to work. That there was such and such a law about it, and that they’d extend my sentence because of it. I would be convicted and I’d never come out of prison, they said. One day I really was summoned before someone who introduced himself as the district prosecutor, and he told me again that I was disrupting the economic plan and that I would get another conviction for it. In short, he showed me that I was in danger of staying in prison until my death.”