Jiří Wonka

"In 1986, as I said, we were arrested on May 26. I came back a year later. But it was a terror in Hradec, I was there for nine months, I was beaten by Ivo Vylet'al for the clippings about Gorbachev -that time something was changing and I cut them out. He started hitting me in the spine and I became paralyzed. And as it happens, I was immediately prosecuted for assaulting the warden. But since I was being prosecuted, they put it on hold because I was being prosecuted for more serious crimes than verbal assault. Once they blindfolded me, burned me with cigarettes, threw a rope at me, told me to hang myself, and added that I was a German swine, or whatever they said. After that I went to Ruzyně, but I didn't have any problems there."

"They did it by taking my brother away in irons, leading him around the city, my mother saw it from the window. Let your clients see what a defendant of poor people looks like, they told him. They humiliated him terribly, they even took him around the plant."

“Viktor Vaničků, the butcher’s son - and butchers were prominent figures back then - placed fourth at the running race. And although my brother came in ahead of him, the school’s headmaster awarded him the potato medal [a Czech term for fourth place - trans.]. My brother was sad, but he didn’t cry and he said: ‘When I grow up, I’ll fight for justice.’ So we carried that sense of injustice in us since childhood. That’s why my brother and I were strongly connected to each other.”

“They were sadists like the SS, they burnt me with cigarettes. No one would believe it. When I came back from prison, I was checked up by American doctors brought by Jiřina Šiklová. And they said the last time they’d seen something like that was in Nigeria.”

“I was lying in Thomayer Hospital at the time. The future senator Václav Benda phoned me that he’d been tasked by Petr Uhl to inform me that my brother was dead. So I had to interrupt the treatment. Jiřina Šiklová worked there as a cleaning lady at the time, she sent my mother some kind of tranquilliser pill. I wondered how she’d get through it... She was sixty-seven or sixty-nine years old. She found out about it at the post office in Vrchlabí, when she overheard a conversation of the local clerks: ‘Mr Čáp, here’s a telegram, deliver it, Pavel Wonka died in prison.’ ‘Well, at least it’s over for him now, I mean, he was in prison all the time,’ the other man remarked. To which my mother said: ‘Mr Čáp, what are you saying?’ That’s how my mother found out about my brother’s death. But the worst was when we had to identify the dead body, that was not a pretty sight. The only thing we have left from my brother is a broken, bashed up suitcase covered in sticky tape. That’s all that was left of my brother.”