Pavel Kolínek

“Since I was a child, I didn’t go to school on Saturdays, because that was how my parents raised me. Already as an eighth grader I found myself standing on trial because of it. In 1951 or 1952 they fired the old veterans, teachers who weren’t good enough politically, from the school in Poštorná. And they started replacing them with new ones. Young girls and boys from Brno. They replaced them and the new ones discovered they had someone there who refused to come on Saturdays. And they put me to court. That was the first time I was at court. The court turned it down, saying I was not yet of age. Only my parents. And there they probably though: ‘We won’t convince old Kolínek, that’s dumb, who’d take care of the children.’ ”

“We observe the Saturday from sunset to sunset, like the Jews. I know that in January the sunset was at four o’clock. Three o’clock and the aggressive first lieutenant rushed up. I guess he was tasked with giving me some order on Saturday, and he forgot. So he rushed up at three o’clock, he took me aside and said: ‘Comrade, the Western borders have been crossed by American and German divisions. Pack your field gear and have at them.’ I said: ‘Comrade first lieutenant, by myself?’ - ‘Yes, now come on!’ So I said: ‘Well, in that case I’m not going.’ I refused, I said I didn’t believe it, that it couldn’t be true. That was the problem that happened to me. If it hadn’t been this, they would’ve come up with something else. That was the order that I didn’t obey. And now, looking back, I reckon I should get the Nobel Prize for it, because I saved world peace. Just think what would happen now in Crimea, if some soldier started shooting into those Russians. The Russians would blow the place up. So I reckoned they should thank me actually. I think it was nonsense, but it was a way [for them] to get me to refuse to obey an order, so I would go to prison.”

“Inside the concrete room, I think, the temperature was about four five degrees Celsius. When they stripped you of your clothes and gave you just some oh-so-thin [clothing], and walking in that the whole day, I went round and round the room so many times... At Pankrác, the clock would toll, so I knew when it was quarter past, half past, the whole hour, but not at Bory... So in that confinement, to keep off the worst of the cold, I would run around like a lion in a cage. And during one quarter of an hour I would do a hundred-and-seven rounds. When I lied down to sleep at night, my legs would be all swollen up from the sixteen hours of walking. And I wasn’t allowed to sit down. And when I did sit, I didn’t have any socks, and we only had some track shoes, and I had to put one of them under my bum because you couldn’t sit on the concrete just like that.”

“Some Soviets made camp behind our [house]. They had lots of tents and horses there, they were primitive. The most beautiful memory was when two of their commanders came in an open-topped commander’s car, and us children kept looking the car all over, there were at least twenty thirty of us, all curious. Suddenly the young officer pointed at us and waved his finger and gesticulated to come closer. The most courageous started towards him, but he said no and sent them away. And he pointed at me. The older ones shoved me forward. So I went towards him. He hugged me, stroked me. Most often I would get a slap or something, I’d never experienced something like that. And he kept saying something. Then he reached out under the dashboard and pulled out a beautiful clockwork tank. It moved. I was very surprised and happy. I guess I reminded him of his son, maybe I looked similar. I remember him to this day.”