Otto Šebor

“After I had been for a few days on the third department of the Kartouzy prison - or if you like at the ‘correctional and labor camp’ in Valdice u Jičína – I was taken to the investigation room where two civilian employees showed up and wanted to talk with me. It turned out that they were in fact agency employees of the secret state police (StB). They started to exert very intense pressure on me with the aim of talking me into signing a collaboration agreement with the StB. Of course they promised me lots of things. They said that they needed young people to work for them, people that they could rely on. They told me that I’d be given the opportunity to finish my studies. They promised that if I signed the cooperation, my parents would be released from prison. This was an immensely strenuous pressure that they exerted on me – in particular the part with my parents. The vision of my parents being freed from prison was of course extremely tempting for me. However, I intensively thought about the verity of these promises. After my experiences from the custody in Cheb and from the court prison in Prague, Pankrác, I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that their only goal was to lure me into cooperation with them and that they would promise me anything in order to achieve this. Anyway, they weren’t bound to deliver on their promises later on. You couldn’t trust their promises because there was no guarantee they would fulfill them. The only thing that was certain was the monstrous obligation, the thought that the StB would catch me into its net.”

“I could see from the window that Kulhánek together with another inmate who was part of the group that had just gone on the walk began to climb up the wall in the place where the wing of the prison building reached the roof of the garage that belonged to the prison administration. I was fascinated as I saw the two men climbing up the wall like two apes. They climbed on the rooftop of the garage and ran toward its edge from where they jumped into the treetop of a maple tree that belonged to an alley adjacent to the prison building. They each jumped into a different maple tree, the round treetops being cropped and alive with leaves. You could see how the branches spread out under the weight of the bodies and you could hear the sound of the impact of their hobnailed prison boots on the pavement. Just seconds into this, somebody shouted ‘Stop! Stop!’ and I heard the sound of shots being fired. This is a story which ended miserably for Kulhánek and his fellow inmate. These two men had decided to escape from the prison walls but they had bad luck. Kulhánek landed on the pavement just a few meters away from the commander of the Cheb prison who was just on his way to work.”

“After his arrest, Kulhánek was being taken by the StB officers for identification to the headquarters in Bartolomějská Street. They were in doubt about his identity because he showed them a fake ID. They took the tram No. 2 for the way from the place of arrest in Kateřinská Street to Bartolomějská Street. When the tram was approaching the station at Charles Square, Kulhánek took advantage of the sharp braking of the tram, knocked down the two accompanying officers and jumped out of the tram which was still moving and braking. The StB agents were closely on his heels and didn’t hesitate to use their guns. He tried to shake them off by a quick run through Charles Square to Ječná Street where he spotted a woman getting out of one of the houses to walk her dog. At night, the houses were usually locked and thus Kulhánek used this opportunity to get inside the house, to the inner courtyard and from there to the courtyards of the other buildings from where he could have hoped to escape his pursuers. In the course of the shooting and the crazy chase, he repeatedly fell down and hurt his knee. Finally, when he was running through the elevated ground floor and down the staircase to the courtyard from where he wanted to escape, he fell down and that’s where the StB officers captured him.”