"They used to take him up to the first floor, or up the stairs, and he would meet people who were tortured before him, and there was this bed, some kind of a couch, and he had to go there, and now of course the guard, or the interrogator, he started asking him all kinds of questions, and if he didn't like his answer or if he refused to answer, he had this lamp there. And he had to undress, and he had those metal strips in his shoes, and he was wired to the lamp. So when the interrogator didn't like what he was saying, he would always turn on the lamp, and he told me how much it hurt as everytime it went right through his body, this terrible pain, so nobody could imagine him being tortured like that."
"I remember that I was curious how it would be like inside, in this Valdice prison. And when they let us in, there was this huge courtyard and there were tables in the courtyard and there was a guard sitting at each table. And that's where they brought him, with his head completely shaved. I was terrified because I didn't know him like that. And he told us what he was doing there, that they were doing something with some beads. And there was this thing I found interesting about the yard, because it looked like there was some kind of a chapel in the back. So I could see that it had probably been used for something completely different before."
Miloslava Dohnalíková, née Studená, was born on April 22 1943 in Čejkovice in the Hodonín Region. She comes from a devout Catholic family of teachers – as both her parents, Libuše and Miloslav, were teachers at Čejkovice’s local school. Miloslava is the last of four children. Her eldest brother, Lubomír, spent the last months of the Second World War in Austria as a part of the Reich Labour Service, and in the 1960s he was sentenced to three years in prison for anti-government activities, as a leader of an illegal Boyscout troop in Prostějov (he did most of his sentence at the Valdice prison, the rest he spent at the Bory prison). In 1953, at the age of ten, the witness lost her mother. She graduated from the nursing school with a degree in pediatric nursing and worked for almost three decades in the children’s ward of the Kromeriz psychiatric hospital. In 1974, she married Ladislav Dohnalík, a political prisoner (as a member of the Orel Organisation, he spent four years in a labour camp in the Jáchymov region). In 1990, she took early retirement. At the time of the interview (2023), she lived with her brother Lubomír in the Home of the Holy Cross Retirement Home in the town of Kroměříž.
