Lubomír Gižický

“I did an entrance exam to technical school. But I was then informed that I wasn’t accepted. So I asked one of the teachers there, as he lived next door and I was friends with his son, and he told me that my father wasn’t of working class origin and that he was a technical clerk, and for that reason I wasn’t entitled to study. So I trained to be a construction mechanic at the Czechoslovak Construction Works. But I don’t have my certification, I missed out on that because I decided to flee the country at that time. My mum’s brother, my uncle that is, he was much younger than my mum, so I got talking with him and we agreed to skip out over the border. We had that agreed, in the time of our preparations I met up with one classmate from my extended studies, one Jan Krejčí. One word led to the next and I was there telling him I was getting out of here, that I wouldn’t stay no longer. He suggested it would be a good idea to make some strike first, so that we gain some renown abroad. Okay, so me and my uncle agreed to loosen some screws on a cement lift in the cement plant in Vítkovice where my uncle worked. Because cement was a strategic material at the time. No explosives, nothing like that, we’d just loosen the screws holding the lift, so that when it started moving, it would fall down and delay production.”

“Three months. And yet everyone knew. I don’t understand why it all had to be. The doctors in Tišnov put me together again afterwards, because my feet were like this. I couldn’t put any shoe on. My feet were horribly swollen. That was a consequence of the interrogations by State Security. By the time the interrogations were definitely over, my heels were mashed up. I don’t want to speak about it much. Because I still don’t know, to this day, who interrogated me. I was underground and they put sunglasses on my eyes, they were completely black. Then the warder took me by the hand and led me to some office and sat me down on a chair, pulled my arms behind me, handcuffs, and I was turned into a punching bag. They kept asking me things. And I kept saying: ‘I don’t know anything. You know everything. Krejčí must have told you everything.’ That lasted three months, those interrogations.”

“Then when the interrogations were over, they sat me in an office with one, what for me was back then an older bloke. He was about fifty at the time. And I know he was smoking a pipe and tapping away at a type writer, preparing the report. Then he took the one sheet of paper, passed it to me and said: ‘You’ll sign that for me.’ I looked at it and it was written there that they had treated me decently. I told him I couldn’t sign that. ‘You don’t have it, your choice.’ He pressed a button, the boys came in and threw me into a cellar. Without shoes. Just socks, trousers and a shirt, into this small room under the stairs, just slightly larger than an armchair. I don’t know how long I was there, because it was pitch black in there. I don’t know how long, but it was a considerable length of time. The concrete was freezing cold at first, but it stopped hurting after a bit. Then the warder brought me some ersatz coffee and half a slice of bread. I said: ‘Tell him I’ll sign it.’