“And if you want to hear something funny, we made the most of every occasion possible while in military. This group of ours formed a so-called window dressing group. None of us had any clue about it, but we did decorations nevertheless. We were supposed to decorate the PTS, that was a political-educational room (or whatever it was that they called it), it was this small hall, to get it ready for elections. We got these piles, packages, tubes full of mottos. Well, and we received a request, or more like an order, to get the room ready for elections. And so we got the room ready for elections, we decorated it, obviously. And my friend Olda had a life-saving idea. Obviously, when we were decorating, people drank a lot back then, we had vodka and rum (there wasn’t much of anything else at the time). And so we had a couple of bottles, there was eight, nine, ten of us and we decorated and decorated. Then our commander came to check up on us, and during the check-up he said: “You have something to drink in here, don’t you?” “No, we don’t have anything here.” And he kept looking and looking, he honestly went through every hole he could find. When he left, and we could be sure he was gone, we had these busts of Stalin and Gottwald, they were hollow inside, and we had the bottles hidden inside of them, and he never found out.”
“There were five of us in class with some dirt in our background. The inspector said: “I will sign an immediate letter of acceptation to the university but you have to denounce your dad.” For me that was unheard of, to say something like that. At that time I told him, with lots of emotion, some nasty words that were perhaps not worthy of a student. Because that was a punishment for the fact that my father hadn’t been born where the era thought he should have been born.”
“Otherwise the four or five prison camps were surrounded with a fence with loopholes in the corners, there were these towers, like when you go tree stand hunting. So these were there, with soldiers armed with regular weapons. We never had a weapon in our hands the entire time. When I was there the most we got was a jackhammer, a shovel, a chisel, or something similar. We, that group of ours, never once held a gun in our hands. I have never held a gun in my hands. I have a huge aversion to guns too.”
Jaroslav Ryba was born on the 10th of April in Senomaty, in the Rakovník area. In 1952 his father was declared a kulak, sentenced to five years in prison, and deprived of all property. Following his studies Jaroslav worked for the Československé státní statky Žatecko (Czechoslovak National Estates). This job was interrupted by his military service obligation. Because of his kulak background he was considered to be a politically unreliable person, his background got an “E” grade and he was transferred to the 13th Labour Batallion (“Pomocný technický prapor”). There he spent two years working as a coal miner in the Pokrok mine in Ostrava-Radvanice. After this period of time he joined the Research Institute of Crop Production in Prague-Ruzyně, but in 1958 he was let go because of his background. This meant he lost his dream position of a plant breeder and geneticist, and instead he had to accept a driver’s assistant position with the ČSAD bus company. However, thanks to his efforts at work and thanks to the help of his friends he managed to get to the Ministry of Transport where he worked until his retirement. At the time of writing this text, he lived in Prague, wrote books about the Labour Batallions, and collected quotes. Jaroslav Ryba passed away on February, the 16th, 2018.
