Jiřina Jelínková

“In the mine, we were getting the names of prisoners who were coming to us, and I, as the head of the personal department, was registering them. I thus new exactly who came there. There was also the ice hockey player Modrý. I would always ask them what they had been sentenced for, and so on. Then there was one person I knew and he needed to send a letter, and so I somehow organized it with those on duty… I was sending their letters and packages to their families. When a family received such an unexpected letter, it helped them a lot. Those who have been in prison know what it means if they get a letter where the other person can write what he or she really feels. I never read those letters, not even when they hadn’t sealed the envelope. I only put stamps on them. I have never read them, but they certainly didn’t write things like: ´I am fine and all is well.´ Those letters were quite long. When I was sending the packages, it was always under an assumed name. It was quite a show. I was using the name Olga Černá. I was working in the mine with certain Lumír Vaněk. This Vaněk had been in prison one year before me. His mother was married and we would always collect some money and I would bring it to her as a greeting for Lumír. I have never told her my name. But now, imagine this: later, when I was already in the prison cell, a lady came there who introduced herself as Olga Černá. But I had not told the StB men that I had used such name as my alias. I thought: ´They got the name somewhere, what’s gonna happen now?´ By coincidence, when I returned, my mother had a purse and she told me to take it so that I would not have to buy a new one. Inside the purse there was a letter from the post office with the name Olga Černá as the sender. A woman named Olga Černá really existed and I was trying to find her afterward, because I wanted to tell her that if somebody sends her a thank-you letter for all those packages and letters, it would actually be for me.”

“The worst thing was that when I was arrested I had been already three months pregnant. I had the additional food stamps with me. Yesterday I was trying to remember whether I had had my pregnancy card, but I think I had. I had an abortion after five days in Prague, I collapsed when they were interrogating me all the time, days and nights. (Interviewer’s question: You were not able to have children after that?) I was then nearly forty years old and doctor Řepišťák told my husband that I was in such a bad psychic condition that he was not able to guarantee that the baby would be healthy. They were friends, they used to for a beer to the Metropolka pub. The doctor told me the same thing, and it would have been very difficult for me to say that the child would be suffering because of me. It was therefore recorded as a normal abortion.”

“There was only one suicide during the time I was there. I felt terribly sorry for that girl. When we were walking in circles outside in the yard, we noticed that one woman was always walking there alone… She kept to herself. We came to ask her what the matter was. I remember that her name was Zuzana. She was from Slovakia. At that time I had already served about five years and she told me: ´Oh, my God, how could you endure it for so long, that’s horrible.´ She was sentenced only to one year and she would always say: ´My poor children, they will not see me anymore.´ She was to be released on August 28, I still remember the date precisely, and I think it was the year 1958. Then suddenly at ten o’clock there was an order for everyone to get out. We stood in the row and waited. One was missing. It was this Zuzana. The place was all messed up because some construction work was in progress at that time. Search dogs and other policemen arrived there. The dogs were sniffing around the place, searching, but haven’t found anything. At 5 a.m. the production manager discovered Zuzana in the toilet cubicle. Accidentally, nobody had gone to check the toilet and she had hanged herself there and cut her wrists on top of that. And on August 28, when she was to be released, her husband came for her. She couldn’t imagine that she would go back to their little village and everyone would be pointing a finger at her because she had been in prison. What was she to do? She had said something stupid to somebody and she was sentenced for that. How many people there were who were serving their sentence for some trifle, which normally you would have just let go? At that time I really cried because Zuzana ended up like this.”

“When Eve left the paradise, at least she had that fig leaf. I didn’t even have a fig leaf when I left. I didn’t have anything at all. No panties, nothing. Not even a teaspoon. They took away everything from us, including our apartment. We were arrested so that they would be able to take our flat and give it to that StB agent. (Interviewer’s question: What was this StB man’s name?) I don’t know. I have no idea who moved there after us. We were renovating the flat, because the previous tenants had left some greasy stains on the floor parquetry. They must have poured some car oil over the floor or what not, because there were round greasy marks as if an oil can had been placed there. We had it scrubbed. We were repairing everything like idiots. Brand new bed linen, hundred and twenty Crowns, which I haven’t even washed once. There was such scarcity of apartments at that time that we had been waiting four years to get one. But as soon as we got it, they arrested us right when we had furnished the apartment.”

“Through some string-pulling I got a job in Cihelna Jiří and I my job there was sprinkling salt on railroad switches. It was still in winter. I wore only my overalls and a T-shirt under them. Then I got sick with a serious kidney inflammation. An ambulance carried me to the hospital. It was to be my first birthday that I would celebrate at home. I had a roast duck ready as I had wished, and a Malakov cake and what not. But I haven’t even tasted any of it. I ended up in hospital on an IV drip.”

“Eda would get a visit pass that he was permitted to come to see me. But he would receive it a week later, and it was thus no longer valid. Or he would send letters when he was going somewhere by train. He would get off somewhere on the way and put the letter in the postbox there. The letter didn’t come and the prison chief told me: ´If the letter had come to us, I would have had no reason to withhold any letters from you.´ It was thus the Secret Police in Pardubice that was apparently receiving all our letters. On top of that, Eda learnt that I was allegedly dating another man there, a prisoner. I wonder where I would find one in an all-female prison. Allegedly he was from southern Moravia and he was singing for me every evening, he was sent there to do some work. How Eda felt about it… He was not getting any letters from me, I wasn’t receiving any letters from him, we had no way to communicate. Eventually Eda got so angry that one day he arrived there in person and asked to see the prison chief and told him about it. The chief called me. We were allowed a one-hour visit and the chief said: ´If the letters had arrived to us, I would have had absolutely no reason not to give them to your wife.´ So they were making life hard for us even in prison. They wanted to break up our family, because allegedly I wanted to divorce him and he allegedly wanted to divorce me, because I was dating a prisoner there.”

“I learnt that my husband was in hospital. He had had some accident and he had to lie in bed. I went there outside the visiting hours and Eda was sleeping. I kissed him and he replied: ´Just pinch me, pinch me, so that I believe it’s really you.´ He explained to me where he lived and where I was to go. In this house, when you walk down the stairs, three stairs under the ground level, there was a room. By chance it was also equipped with a bathtub and a toilet. So we actually had the basics. But apart of that, how it looked… There was a tiny hallway, a toilet and bathroom on one side and the room on the other. We had the walls covered with wrapping paper; there was a wooden stick to put hangers on. There we would hang the clothes we wore. We didn’t need a wardrobe, because we had nothing to put in it. There was a couch. Our neighbour threw out a chromium-plated bed with mattresses and luckily Eda got hold of it, in case Jiřina came so that she would have something to sleep on. So this was our new furniture that we owned. And there was a rat which was coming into our flat through the toilet. Since the floor was under the ground level, it didn’t need to go far. I was absolutely psyched out, I was hysterical. We could hear the rat gnawing at nights. Later we put some tin sheet over it so that it wouldn’t be able to get there.”