Rudolf Mrázek

“They arrested me on Monday, just when I had military training as part of my university education. There was a training ground in the courtyard of the Líšen chateau. We were doing physical exercise there and as they came for me, we were just dismantling machine guns. Three men in leather coats came over, talked to the officer and he asked whether there was any Mrázek present. I said: ‘Yes, here,’ and so I went. They loaded me in the ‘Tatraplán’ car, I believe, and that was it. They brought me to Příční street. The other boys – Vlastík and Josef – stayed in that courtyard and already knew things were bad. They thought: ‘Something is happening here, we’ll go ask as soon as we get home.’ They went to our place where at that very moment, they were undertaking a house search. One lady used to live on the floor above ours. When the boys came over and knocked, she went to open the door and told them: ‘The secret police is here.’ But the boys didn’t manage to leave anymore, were arrested as well, and imprisoned ever since.”

“It was a cell for twenty-two people. He spoke Czech and presented himself as a ‘Czechoslovak’ rather than Slovak. But in there, he had proven himself to be anti-Czechoslovak. He was in charge of a workshop producing agricultural machinery – Agrostroj Pelhřimov had a factory there. Automatic cutters of various sorts were being produced there. He and Otto Obuch, an economist, were inmates in charge of this factory. He used to have lackeys in his room. Whenever food was being distributed, these people delivered it to him from the guards. He’d just be sitting down while they went and brought him food. And he used to… It was the times when they began distributing newspapers in Leopoldov. For many years, they were not accessible in the hole. Whenever he finished his meal, he pushed away the mess tins while another of his lackeys went and washed them for him. He used to say in Slovak: ‘Give me something to read.’ I would pass him Rudé právo – they only had that and Pravda. He would say: ‘I won’t read this gibberish, pass me the Slovak paper.’ And so he had proven himself to be a fascist and a nationalist. There was a secret police officer from the Bratislava division, he had a German name. This guy used to investigate Husák. And he was himself imprisoned in Leopoldov since 1957 for inhuman treatment of prisoners. That must have been something, to make it to Leopoldov for inhuman treatment of prisoners during the communist era. We used to go for walks and the two of them were always walking together like two gays. I told him: ‘Gusta, my God, how can you talk to this man who got you in prison for life on false accusations?’ Husák was sentenced as part of the Slánský process here in Bohemia. And he replied: ‘Go on, you. You never know when you will need the help of someone.’”

"The worst days were the ones following my arrest. I was used to having a busy life: girls - I had two girls that I dated, football, theater. I lived a cheerful life of a college student. And now suddenly it was over and I was thrown into some dirty hole. At the corner of Příčná Street and Bratislavská Street – this was where the detention prison of the StB was located. They had some of the deepest cellars that I know of. At least eight meters deep. It was horrible. Those were the worst days of my life. To accept the fact that life as I had known it was over for me ... The whole thing was haunting me. At the interrogations, they scared the heck out of us: ‘you’ll get the rope. You are saboteurs and you wanted to exterminate the whole nation’."

“We were already pondering that things were getting out of hand, that there was too much for us to do. One class below us in the high school was attended by Láďa Stávek and Milan Blažek, the son of the director of the local agricultural collective. We had an agreement to cease our activities. This is where we were tricked by one informer. We thought we had to find someone older, a wise and experienced person who had been through various things in life already. There was a guy there – we used to call him the dentist. His name was Jedlička, he was a dental technician, making dental plates. The word was that he used to be part of the anti-German resistance, and so we decided to try him out… Well, it turned out badly because he was an informer of the secret police.”

"It was crazy. I wouldn’t dare to do it today. We invented so-called ‘ignitors’. If you compare it with all the complex bomb mechanisms which have a timer, a clock and a fuse, we simply put some gunpowder in a sock, put a piece of a nice, soft and woven cord from the curtains, which smoldered finely. We measured how long it took for one centimeter to burn off, determined how many centimeters would last for half an hour. Later, we even waxed it with a candle. In wet conditions, it wouldn’t get moist and it smoldered. It was reliable. It worked. We introduced it into a sock filled with gunpowder and put the device into a hay stack. It caught on flames. Very simple these ignitors. I did them at home. Luckily it turned out that way, because I put it in the kitchen stove as we didn’t heat. My mother went with me as surveillance, because I was only seventeen years old. She was at that party so we didn’t heat. Now Mojmír said: 'well, let's throw it in there'. I said: 'Jesus Christ, I left it at home. Well, it was too late to do anything about it. It was wet, New Year's Eve. It was muddy. We had to run to the barn in the canter. It was a barn of the farm where we had the clubhouse. They took it from the Horvát family and joined it with the farms collective in Křenovice. Mojmír somewhere got a three-liter jerry can with gasoline. He grabbed the canister, we ran there, he poured the gas out and threw the canister with the rest of the gas inside. He didn’t have to do it because when we ran away the canister exploded."

"The reason why we started it was when we saw those injustices being done. They took away the seed and thus the farmer had nothing to sow in the ground in the spring. Of course, as a result, there was nothing he could deliver and so they locked him up for undermining the state economy. This is how the Bolsheviks did it. We fought against it. We described these practices in our leaflets. At first, we threatened that if they handled the farmers like that, we’d burn down their houses and the farms collectives. Then we even threatened them with the eradication of their families. But as this didn’t really work, we started to set on fire stacks and the barns, where they kept their agricultural machinery, the harvesters and tractors parked over the winter. So this is what made us to do this activity. It was actually a reaction to our surroundings and the group emerged spontaneously. We didn’t really want to hurt anyone, not even those cooperatives. We just set a few stacks on fire and finally I have a good feeling because I'm convinced that we managed to stop the aggression in the area. I mean this hard, violent collectivization aimed against the peasants in the neighborhood where we started those fliers and acts."

"This was much fun too. We were in the Křenovice youth union, but we weren’t members. None of us joined the union. There wasn’t even any socialist youth there. We just had the keys to the clubhouse and we voted ourselves into the committee and thus we could use youth clubhouse and engage in plotting against the regime there. At the trial, it came back badly. They were furious because we had written a number of recommendations to Universities. We did that in a number of cases of grammar schools. In our recommendations, we wrote things like: 'if only we had more comrades like him’. We had the union stamps, we were the functionaries of the youth union, but we weren’t even its members. It was so much fun and the fact that we had completely dominated the youth union really bothered them a great deal."

"They made miners of us in three days of training. Already on my first work day, the hose gave me a beating. It nailed Mojmír to the ceiling. We didn’t know that it suffices to turn the tap just a little bit. Instead, I turned it completely open and the hose stiffened, went up and pinned him to the ceiling by his hand. I had no better idea than to take an ax and cut the hose. Now the hose got loose and began to whirl around in a fury, so I got smacked by it a good bit. I could have broken it, but this I only learned later. I closed the valve and Mojmír of course fell down again. After this complete disaster, they separated us."