“Across Petrof’s factory was a restaurant and that was where the elections were taking place. There was music playing outside the restaurant and the atmosphere was very cheerful. I came inside and saw that the voting was public. You were given a ballot paper and publicly, in front of their eyes so that they could see how you voted, you had to throw it inside the ballot box. I had learned about it beforehand and therefore I brought a newspaper with me that said that the elections would be democratic and fair and that the vote would be secret. I read the article in the newspaper aloud in front of them and said that I demand that a screen be installed so that everything was as it should have been. One of the Communists came to me and told me: ‘Karel, don’t be a fool, don’t you know what trouble you’re up to here?’ I told him that I was only demanding what they had promised. So they put up a screen there and it was a great upheaval. I went behind the screen and of course another Communist stood there. I told him: ‘Just to make sure that you know for whom I’m voting, I’m throwing in a blank ballot paper’. After the elections they counted the votes and we were ten people that opted for the blank ballot.”
“When I came back home and I moved here with my wife and children, I was getting anonymous letters in which someone was threatening to kill me for opposing the Communists. So I wasn’t walking on the pavements but in the middle of the street to have enough space in case something happened. But it was all just saber-rattling – no one has ever assaulted me.”
“It was filled with water but I was lucky that the lid of the toilet bowl was lifted. That’s where I spent those days. My feet were all broken because they kept thinking that I was hiding something from them. I confessed that I did hold the speeches at the gatherings of the trades. When they asked me about my sister, I told them: ‘Wouldn’t you help your sister’? 'You rascal, who do you think you are’? Half of my body was paralyzed afterwards. The worst, however, was the mental distress. Later, they didn’t beat me anymore, they just put me in a dark room and left me there. But I still couldn’t walk as my feet weren’t quite healed, yet. I went to see the doctor – a warder led me there. Next to the door of the doctor’s office stood a young girl; she must have been under twenty. As it was prohibited to speak I just gave her a smile. She unbuttoned her blouse and I could see her breast that was covered with burned spots. She said: ‘That’s from the cigarettes’. They burned her breast with cigarettes. I haven’t seen her ever after.”
“One of them – we called him ‘Šlincák’ because he had a scar on his face – told us he had been trained at the NKVD in Moscow. He said that he’d make a table talk if he wanted to. He was a great sadist. The other one wasn’t beating us that hard.”
“That day was different. Previously, when they wanted somebody to step out, they just called his number. My number was 010378, so they’d say: ‘Number 010378, step out!’ But on that day, they called our names instead. We lined up and of the 1400 or so inmates in the camp, they released about 500 or 600 that day. I had a little bit of money that I saved from the tiny salary we were paid, so I could buy myself decent trousers, a jacket and a pair of shoes. They had a bus ready for us and they brought us to Prague. The scene from the train station where they dropped us off is unforgettable. I had dinner and I remember that it cost 56 crowns. I paid a hundred for it and told him to keep the change. Then I took a train home. I arrived in Hradec and took the trolleybus Nr. 2. There were a couple of acquaintances in the bus but we pretended not to recognize each other; they were just staring at me unbelievingly. Then I got off the bus and walked home. At home, I knocked on the window and my wife came to open the door. I told her she should look first who’s behind the door before opening it. She told me she expected me to come home. She knew I’d come. It couldn’t have been anyone else she said. We left our parents sleeping even though they were already woken up. They just didn’t want to disturb us. It was a very touching reunion. It’s very emotional when you have the opportunity again to embrace a loved person and to kiss her.”
Karel Páral was born on February 22, 1921, in Chvojenec near Pardubice in a trader‘s family. His parents soon moved to Nový Hradec Králové, where Karel Páral spent the rest of his life. He went to elementary and to secondary school in Hradec. His parents saw him as the successor to their trading and therefore they put him in an Academy of Commerce from which he graduated in 1939. In 1942, he was forced to work in the Reich. He worked in Wroclaw in a locomotive factory (Feldbahn Fabrik). He secretly kept coming back to the Protectorate in order to see his girlfriend who he married in 1943. At the end of the war, he fled from Wroclaw from the advancing Red Army and returned home. In 1948, he helped his sister Věra, her husband, and their four-year old son to cross the frontier to the American occupation zone in Germany. The same year, he demonstrated his protest with the situation after February 1948 by publicly throwing a blank ballot paper into the ballot box in the elections to the National Assembly. He also spoke at gatherings of trades where he pointed out the discrepancies between what the Communists had been promising before the elections and the reality that followed after the elections. His speeches were often accompanied by enthusiastic applauses from the audience. He was arrested on June 19, 1949, in his house and was brutally interrogated for a couple of months. His trial was in October, 1950. He was tried publicly together with 32 other defendants, most of whom Páral didn‘t even know. He was sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment. He was released in 1960 after the first great presidential amnesty, after he had already served two thirds of his term in heavy incarceration in the prisons and uranium mines of Jáchymov and Příbram. After his release, he worked until his retirement exclusively in worker‘s professions. After the revolution, he participated in the re-establishment of the Club of Political Prisoners in Hradec Králové and entered active politics. He was the vice-president of the district organization of the Civic Democrats (ODS). In 1998, he left the position of the president of the district branch of the Confederation of Political Prisoners in order to take care of his wife who was seriously ill. He was thereafter named the honorary president of the Confederation and has remained in this position until today. In 2002, he received the prestigious Dr. František Ulrich award for 2001, which is annually awarded by the city of Hradec Králové for a lifetime work of social, artistic or scientific significance.
