Pavel Hlavatý

“I hadn’t had pain like that before. Fever rising, I go to the doctor, he looks at my papers and says: ‘Oh, you’re going home, I understand, you don’t want to work.’ I said: ‘No, sir, I’m sick, do something with me.’ He prescribed me a syrup, he assumed I had the flu or a cough. But someone drank my syrup up because the only drugs available in prison back then were tonic pills for asthma, Astmatol and Yastyl. After two or three pills you’d feel inebriated. Outside, you’d buy ten for 15 crowns, but there you paid 30 crowns for five before Christmas. I never tried it. I was afraid I’d like it. They also brewed ‘woozifier’ - you took 3.5 litres of tea infusion, added one Georgian cognac and all the pills available. They sipped at it all through the evening and went to bed all woozy. Those who had Yastyl, they didn’t sleep. I was used to going to sleep at 4 o’clock because I didn’t use to teach until the afternoon, and now I was supposed to get up at 4, but I was only just falling asleep. And these boys who couldn’t sleep, they were glad they had someone who listened to them. Nonetheless, the day before my release the doctor wrote that I was completely healthy. So I left the prison on Sunday, and at 7 a.m. on Monday I was in hospital because I had phoned some friends who were doctors, and they told me: ‘Don’t move, that’s rheumatic fever!’ When they took me in at the hospital, my sedimentation measured at 67 on the first mark, 107 on the second, so that if the prison doctor had tested that, he would have had no doubt it was rheumatism. My friends, the doctors, said: ‘Keep lying, don’t move.’ The synovial fluid was starting to decay, and the joints suffer. And in a week the sedimentation went to something like 3 or 5, nobody believed it possible to get down so fast. I also had children’s rheumatism, where they injected the medicine into us, or they gave us this yellow-green-brown liquid, Salicyl. I left hospital after two months, but I stayed at home and recovered on sick leave for another four months.”

“I participated in the attempt to remove MP Drahomír Kolder. That’s an interesting matter because nowadays MPs are unremovable, but because back then there was just one party ruling, it was very simple: if you voted in Havířov, you voted Kolder. And really, within three days we collected some 30,000 signatures together with the person’s address and a more-or-less legible signature. So a group of people set out from Havířov to Smrkovský, as the head of the National Assembly, to hand over the petition to him. But he didn’t remove him. Kolder withdrew a bit, then he was made ambassador in Bulgaria, he was called ‘the apricot ambassador’ I think, then he came back, started ‘cooking up’ some trouble, but then he died.”