Zdeněk Klíbr

“There were about seven wooden sheds, each had ten rooms for twenty prisoners, so in total there were about 1,400 prisoners in the Rovnost camp. Then there was a kitchen, a sickroom, various warehouses, penal cell, it was a kind of small village. There was a double fence and it was in between these fences that Paleček, the camp commander, left prisoners, mostly in winter, as a punishment. We put it down to his moods, and the sins he committed there, they were really terrible, unbelievable, inhuman. As a punishment he sometimes ordered us to stand outside, for instance sometimes in the winter he had this mood and had us standing on the roll-call place the whole morning. In winter, frost and rain. These were inventions of his.”

“The camp was separated from the mining shaft by a wired lane which we passed through whenever we went down to the mine. There were three shifts a day, a total of 1,200 prisoners. The worst thing was that when we came up first in winter, we had to stand there, waiting before the 1,200 prisoners went up. So you stood for an hour outside, while down below, depending on the floor you worked at, was the temperature of about 35°, it was wet, water was dripping from ceilings, we were hot and wet and stood in minus 20° frost, waiting for others to go up.”

“It was a bare room, there was only a sheet-metal plate on the wall which served as bed and which they always locked during the day. At nights I got a blanket to put over this plate and another to cover myself with. Light was on right above me throughout the whole night, and I had to lie down with my hands placed on top of the blanket. It was hard to sleep this way, but I could manage since I was tired after the interrogations. If somebody put his hands under the blanket or turned around, they would immediately bang on the door – hands on the blanket and look at the lamp on the ceiling! There was also a so-called seat made of tin. If I was eligible, they would unlock it and I was able to sit down on it. Otherwise it was kept locked and I had to keep walking in the cell back and forth until I dropped.”

“I worked at the construction site in Komárov near Hořovice, and that was where they arrested me. Four guys in leather coats arrived there and they claimed that they needed to confirm something. We got into a Tatra car. It was obvious to me that nothing good was happening. I got into the car, they put handcuffs on my wrists and dark glasses over my eyes so that I would not see where they were taking me. Only when we arrived I learnt that we were in Prague in Bartolomějská Street in the StB interrogation room. The conditions there were terrible – hunger and cold. In 1953 they were no longer using physical violence, because people were learning about it and reporting it to the West. They tried to exert mental pressure and it was even worse than physical violence. Thirty-hour long interrogations in one stretch, it was unbelievable. Then they would send us to our cells and another interrogation would immediately follow. The officials were taking turns with us.”

“He told me: ‘Look, you will remember even what you had for lunch the second day after you were born.’ I thought about it and I said: ‘Sir, you know that I indeed do remember what I had for lunch then?´ ‘Say it then!’ ‘The second day after my birth I had my mother’s milk for lunch, because my mom was breastfeeding me.’ He exclaimed: ‘You, you, will remember other things, too! Warden! Take him away and bring him for another interrogation in an hour.’”