“Military trains were dispatched for them when they had to leave. They walked over the bridge to the railway station. Since I worked in the railway workshop, I always passed over this bridge. One day as I was going for my afternoon shift, I saw the Russians running on the bridge. The train was slowly beginning to move and then started jumping down from that bridge. They didn’t even look down what was passing under it. They had no idea what was happening under the bridge. One guy fell on a passing car’s mudguard, another missed a car. I thought: ´Oh my God, how can somebody who has survived the war risk his life like this?´ I could not understand that they just didn’t care. Their only worry was to catch their train. Perhaps they had been treated so badly in the army that they would rather chose this. These are things that one cannot understand.”
“I returned from the military service, where the food was very bad, I worked hard, and as a result I got hepatitis. My sister-in-law said to me: ´The white of your eye is totally yellow, go to the doctor.´ I did and the doctor told me that I had hepatitis. I had to be on a diet, I was not allowed to smoke and drink alcohol. I was on a sick leave, it was after Christmas, and one day somebody knocked on the door. The door opened and two men walked in. I thought that they were sent there to check if I was really taking the sick leave. I turned around to hand them the documents. They noticed a quick movement and they jumped on me and twisted my arms behind my back. When my mom saw this, she grabbed a knife and she declared: ´I will not give him to you.´ She attacked them. They knocked her to the ground, too. They said I was arrested. That was around half past eight in the morning and they took me to the Secret Police office. Although I knew what would happen, I was more worried about my mom, because I knew that it would not be easy for her with her poor health.”
“The situation there was like this. A guy I knew from sport training came to me and said: ´Zdeněk, buy half a litre and let’s go fuck the German women.´ He was a guard in those camps. That’s what it was like there. I always used to say that during that time, the bolsheviks have learnt on the Germans that they could treat other people just as they pleased. There were some Germans in the garages, and some drunken militia members came there and began bullying them. The Germans resisted, and the militiamen shot them dead. People all over Ostrava talked about it. Locals began to fear these people with red armbands of the Revolutionary Guards who were going all over the city and pointing out the Germans to the Russians and showing them where the abandoned apartments were. Such was the situation and those who were more emotional and ignored the flag-waving of the nationalist pride and hatred towards the Germans... While the Germans were here, everybody was afraid to do something. But when the Germans were gone, everybody would kill them and beat them. I abhorred such treatment of other people. If there was some doubt, they should have tried them in a proper court, and not let some other people satisfy their sadistic tendencies on them.”
“They made me sit on a chair and they began circling around me: ´So tell us about your anti-state activity.´ I said: ´I am not aware of any anti-state activity. I would like you to ask me questions, and I will truthfully answer them.´ All of a sudden I got hit on my head and ear from the back so hard that I fell down from the chair. Mr. Krhut declared that from then on he would treat me as a class enemy. Thus I learnt how quickly one can turn from an ordinary man into an enemy. They were firing questions at me until the evening and then I was transported to the district prison. They photographed me and took my fingerprints. My fingers were twice as big after all that beating with a cowhide whip. It was after Mílek had cut his wrists, and a superior came there in the evening and cautioned them: ´Be careful about the blood.´ As they were beating me, my fingertips were all cracked and bleeding. Since I was doing box for sport, I was used to some beating. My head was flying from one side to another, but it had no effect on me. They smashed my teeth, my fillings fell out. And when they saw that I didn’t flinch, they began beating me with the cowhide whip. Then I was transported to the district prison.”
“I went to the dentist. His hands were like a miner’s; they probably called him from the mines. He drilled the tooth and put a filling in it. But inflammation developed in my teeth. When I was to appear in court the day after, my face became so swollen that I could not see anything. I had a headache and I felt pain in my face. They came for us and one of the StB policemen asked me: ´What’s wrong with you? It looks as if somebody had given you a beating.´ I didn’t say anything and I just watched the court proceedings. It was a farce. There was a woman, probably the judge or associate judge, and she looked like a whore. Black stockings, overdone make up, and she behaved just like that: she would sit on the table, one leg over another, just as if she were sitting in a bar. I saw that some people struggled to convince the court that they were innocent. I was dizzy and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to endure it. When I was called, I told them: ´Everything is just as I have stated in the protocol.´ That was it. Later I learnt that I was the only one who pleaded guilty. They have changed everything to make it convenient for them.”
“A guy came to work the shift and as he readied himself with his drill, the ground collapsed under him. There was some air pocket and it sucked him in. He was lucky that he had pneumatic and hydraulic drill with him. He got into some sparing. When the others called the rescue workers, they were told: ´He is in the vertical shaft, so we will blow it up.´ The guys protested: ´But you will kill him when all the rocks start flying around.´ We could still hear his voice. They formed a team instead and they began removing the rocks and placing wooden supports in the shaft. It took them two days of digging before they reached him. They admired him: ´What a chap! He managed to keep contact with us all this time.´ They made him a model worker demonstrating what a man is able to endure in the harshest conditions. But then they released him and he died within half a year. He got insane. This experience kept coming back to him. They knew that he was mentally affected by it and therefore they released him.”
Zdeněk Růžička was born in 1925 in Moravská Ostrava. While living in this city he experienced the war and the liberation, but what has remained most deeply etched in his memory was the post-war treatment of Germans. He was witness to riots and mass lynching. Shortly after the arrest of his brother, a former prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Zdeněk was arrested in 1949 for contacts with the resistance group of Jan Buchal. He went through a series of brutal interrogations by the Secret Police in Ostrava. He was only aware of the group‘s existence, but in spite of this he was still sentenced to 14 years of heavy jail in what was the largest politically-motivated court trial in the Ostrava region. His brother Miroslav was sentenced to sixteen years of imprisonment. His brother died four years after his release, leaving behind his wife and two children. Zdeněk Růžička was released in the presidential amnesty in 1960 after having spent ten and a half years in labour camps in the uranium mines in Jáchymov and in the Valdice prison. He continues to live in Ostrava-Přívoz and still strives to share his experience with the communist regime during lectures for students.
