Mgr. Jan Šabata

"Prison is a very good school. You learn things you can't learn at large - mostly, how to get along with all sorts of people, or hit the quotas. I was serving at Bory when the higher-ups decided that political prisoners should not corrupt ordinary criminals. They designated one wing for us. You know what Bory looks like? A five-pointed star. US Air Force pilots used it to navigate when bombing West Bohemia, but whatever. So, us political prisoners occupied one wing. It was weird because the normal prisoners could socialise after work whereas we just sat in our cells and only took those half-hour walks around the yard. We weren't allowed to talk to the cells next door."

"I served with my dad; he was two cells away from me. We weren't allowed to look out the windows during the walks. We weren't allowed at all, and especially not during the walks, but dad was curious to see me. He would peek out and was worried because I walked with my head down and hands behind my back. He didn't know I was replaying chess games in my head. See, I used to tear weekly chess articles out of the newspaper and I learned the games by heart."

"I had no problems with my cellmates, even though - as the lady rightly said - I served along with a freeloader, a rapist and a thief. We spent [time] actually playing dice that we made out of bread. We chewed the bread and made dice out of it and then we played for days. I still have the official papers, the judgments and resolutions and such, with the game scores written on the obverse side. Of course, we recorded how much each of us won playing the dice."