Jan Petrucha

“I experienced February 1948 at the Faculty of Arts. They summoned in the whole of our faculty. We got a slip of paper which said: ‘Failure to attend will be punished by dismissal from your studies.’ There was a lecture, one professor, of Czech I think, he had a lecture, but nothing about politics, not a word, and when he ended, the host stood up and said: ‘Comrades, I received a kind of, kind of leaflet during the lecture, saying I should... I’ll read it to you.’ And he read that we as the Faculty of Arts should collectively join the CPC [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia]. ‘And I would put it straight to the vote. Who is against?’ That was something awful. Everyone fell silent, it was a matter of mere seconds, not a word about politics the whole time before, and then he said this and straight up asked who was against. There was no time to discuss it or anything. And so I think five, eight hands were raised. I was one of them, of course. When he saw there weren’t many, he said to his colleague who was sitting beside him, he said: ‘Colleague, count who is for us joining the CPC.’ And we put our hands down when he asked who was for us joining the CPC, and then some Communist raised his hand, one or two there were. And he said: ‘Count how many are against us joining the CPC.’ But that was another ten, twenty seconds more, and people... other boys had recovered, and so they started shouting: ‘Hey, what’s this, what’s this, for, or against?’ And then: ‘Who’s against, who’s for, we can read and we can write. Anyone who wants to join can do it himself, enough of this, let’s drop this, we shouldn’t even be debating it.’ And he was all startled by it: ‘Well, comrades, so I’ll wrap up, and I hope we’ll meet at work...’ Now what? When it ended up like this. A few days later the same man came into our one class with another man and said: ‘You know, that meeting didn’t end up the way it should have. I’m here now so you can decide for yourselves whether to join the CPC. We’ll give each of you the chance to find suitable employment, but those who won’t understand will meet the same fate that met the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, where they either had to flee the country or were culled. You’ll end up the same. You have a fortnight to decide.’”

“It didn’t take long, and another stetsec [State Security officer - trans.] came in for me, took me out, led me out of the building, and we went down Kunovická Street, we didn’t speak together, I had to stay two steps ahead of him, and: ‘Turn now.’ Into a private house. We turned into a private house, he led me into a cellar, into a kind of room, on the one side about arm’s length and just three metres long. He sat me down behind a table, took out a pistol, put it on the table: ‘And now you’ll start talking.’ Outside the building, in a cellar. That was the worst moment of the whole prison time, of what I experienced. Clueless, helpless, and I saw that I was practically a gonner. So, when he put the pistol on the table and told me to talk... I talked, but in the end he squeezed out of me... He said: ‘I’ll guide you along, so you know whom to tell us about. Who you collaborated with, who your friends were,’ and stuff like that. Those were dreadful moments down there. So what could I do but say some of the names. So one of them was František Hlaváč, who I knew was already locked up. And then my best friend from Lipov, I named him and thought: ‘He’ll understand me.’ But he had already prepared himself when they locked me up, so he had erased all the traces and prepared his response. And I, thanks to my [previous] insolence, ended up okay as well. So, I was in Hradiště for four months, and then they took the whole of our Orel group and moved us to Brno in June 1949, and they put us all on trial that June.”