Ludvík Florián

* 1936

  • “We had been working shifts, of course, and the night-shift would always suffer the most as they would come up with the idea that there would be a cell search, a filcunk, as they would call it. So they would bring us to this wooden building, that served as a community centre of sorts. They would bring us all and we would have to stay in the overcrowded hall for maybe at least two or three hours. Every time, it took them so long. And they would go to the barracks... they would search everything, whether there was someone trying to dig a tunnel. As they found out that the inmates managed to store the soil in the barracks, to put it on the ceiling. So they would do a cell search. But what would they do... they did it on purpose. As it was allowed to buy sugar in a canteen. Or even marmelade could be bought. And other things. So they would... after the search, as we would come back... there would be a mess you couldn´t describe. They would take all the blankets and everything from the shelves we were allowed to make and they would throw it on the ground. All together, even lard, everything they would find... marmalade. And we had to clean that mess by ourselves and set everything straight. They did it on purpose. They wouldn´t just look for some tunnel... they would also make sure to do this during the search. Which was just inhuman... for those young men who just came back from the night-shift... you know, they wanted to sleep and sometimes they would even fall asleep as we would help them and hold them for a while. So they could enjoy just this short moment of micro-sleep, as they were exhausted after work and couldn´t rest. They were just not allowed to sleep. Anywhere.”

  • “They would decide... the management, the chief, that I would be assigned the job of a stone-breaker. So he would send for me and tell me that. And of course I learned about that part of the mine in detail from the boys, from my friends... just everything. So I would tell him: 'You know, I should leave in less than three months so I just wouldn´t go there. I don´t trust myself in such conditions, I could even die there.' - 'So you won´t go there?' - 'Well, I won´t.' - 'To the penal cell'! So I ended up in a penal cell for five days. So in the end, I got to know what the penal cell was. Five days in a penal cell... On the first day, the food was so poor that it wold be hard to describe... they would give you this slurry, just a little bit, I meant to be a soup. No meat at all, one dumpling or some potatoes. That was on the first day, and on the second one, there was no food at all. They would give you just this piece of bread, quite big and this black... we would call it the black sludge, this black chicory coffee, and the story was that there was bromine in it or something like that so the inmates wouldn´t get wild. So they would give me that on the second day. That´s something I can´t forget... why I was telling you that... coming from the camp I would tell myself: 'Well, you have to save the brad for later, till afternoon. Or you will be hungry.' But I couldn´t help myself... I would eat just tiny pieces but after half an hour or an hour maybe, the bread was already gone. And then there was hunger. But it wasn´t like the hunger we would feel outside. As we were quite emaciated back then, we didn´t carry a spare gram of fat, so the body could take from that. That hunger... I would lose three kilos in five days. Like this, I can still remember how was it like. That´s how they would treat us... that´s how it went in the penal cells. If someone would get ten days in a penal cell, that poor fellow... there were also the elderly, the old inmates... and as they would put them in the penal cell, they would often... without anyone knowing, they would die there and then they would be just taken away... Well, that was ugly.”

  • “They would appoint one of the landowners who had been... how to express myself properly and not to offend him... you see, he just somehow wasn´t good at farming... so they would make him a chairman of the JZD (United Agricultural Coop). And they would start harassing the farmers, they would start to take machinery from them, everything, and when they would go to work the fields they would even tell them: 'Stop it, that field is no longer yours, it had been colectivised.' Such things would start to happen, so there´s no wonder that the farmers, well some of them, who held the land for centuries, inheriting it from their ancestors... that they would protest, that they wouldn´t let it be. And I remember meeting several such farmers later in the camps. They would tell them: 'You are not going anywhere. Those fields are no longer yours.' That was how they would establish the Agricultural Coops, by violence. And we, as young men, just couldn´t stand it. So we would say, 'That just can´t be. We have to oppose this.' So our boys would come up with... SODAN was the name of our group. That meant Skautská organizace demokracie a nezávislosti (The Boyscout organisation for democracy and independence). As most of us were Boy scouts. Both girls and boys. So they would decide to sabotage that somehow. So it wouldn´t work, that Agricultural Coop of theirs. So as they would gather all the machinery... well there was this landowner, back then, who had this really big barn, so they would gather all the machinery there. So our boys, especially Ruda Mrázek, would come up with the idea to set it all ablaze.”

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    Ostrov, 11.10.2019

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I learned to be grateful even for the things I didn´t like

Ludvík Florián in 1954
Ludvík Florián in 1954
photo: Internet

Ludvík Florián was born on November 10th of 1936 in Brno. He grew up in the village of Křenovice as the only child in the family. His father used to work at the railroad but at the time his son was born he had already retired after a serious work injury. In the early 50s, the village of Křenovice served as a base for the SODAN resistance group, founded initially by local Boyscout members to oppose the collectivisation in its beginning. Ludvík Florian had become one of the active members. At the beginning, the group would send threatening letters to local officials and they would also print and distribute leaflets. Later, they begun to organise and also to perform the acts of sabotage to oppose the brutal measures taken against local landowners. But most of all, these young resistance fighters had been striving for the Communist regime to be destroyed and for democracy to be reestablished. In 1953, the group had been given away and its members including Ludvík Florián were arrested. He had been interrogated at the Secret Police office in Příčná Street in Brno. After the authorities refused to allow him to meet his father at prison during the investigation, in a desperate situation, he decided to hold a hunger strike protest. After he lost consciousness, he was transferred to a prison hospital in Praha-Bohnice. After that, as a juvenile, he was sentenced to four years and six months in prison and after the trial, he had been transferred to the Vykmanov labour camp. Later he went to the Mariánská camp and after that, he spent most of his sentence in Rovnost (Equality) I. camp. There, he witnessed how political prisoners were being abused and often even tortured. For the whole time, he had been working as a stone-breaker in the uranium mines, in extremely demanding conditions and without any protective gear. He left the camps as a twenty-year old. As a politically unreliable person he hadn´t been allowed to resume his studies. So after his compulsory military service, he had to work as a digger, a miner, and after that as a coal depot employee. He raised eleven children, six whom he had fathered and five whom he adopted. At present, as a pensioner, he has been living in Ostrov nad Ohří with his wife.