“The verdicts were carried out on 7 January 1950 in Prague, and my death sentence was changed to life imprisonment in the Jáchymov concentration camps, where I spent eleven years. Of the main culprits of the group, only I am still alive.”
“But then on the other hand they were worried that we might start thinking too much, and they didn’t have any way of fighting that, and there was this directive from the Soviet Union, to calm things down and to tie our hands up. So they let us build ourselves a culture house, we played music there. So in that sense: we came back from work, we set to building. We went back to work. To keep us from coming up with some kind of hostile activities. It made life a bit easier for us there, in a way. Because to start with, it was worse than the Nazi concentration camps - I don’t want to talk about it. Then it got a bit better in that we could at least breathe and eat.”
“There was a concrete bunker built there for [punishing - trans.] all kinds of nonsense. And when it was -30 degrees, I don’t need to tell you that it wasn’t heated, that’s obvious. But all the windows had to be open, and you were half naked there and you slept there, and in the night they were capable of letting you stand in the freezing cold in just your shirt and underpants for two hours. Then they’d throw you back in. And in the summer everything had to be closed, so there wouldn’t be any ventilation, because you couldn’t breath then, when it was 30+ degrees. So those were the kind of paradoxes, what they tried to do like this... for even the slightest nonsense, whatever they decided...”
“Dear friends, allow me to introduce myself as the former so-called anti-state criminal Evžen Seidl, chairman of the CPP [Confederation of Political Prisoners - trans.] of the Czech Republic, branch No. 34, Louny.”
Full recordings
1
v klubovně Konfederace politických vězňů Louny, 04.11.2015
Evžen Seidl was born on 28 October 1928 as the oldest son of Karel and Ruth Seidl. He grew up in the village of Černčice near Louny. His mother Ruth (née Zlatnik) was from Austria, the daughter of a doctor. She moved to Czechoslovakia after World War I and taught foreign languages there. Through her work she met her future husband Karel Seidl, a military pilot. Evžen attended school in his native Černčice together with the daughter of Kamil Novotný, who was active in the anti-Communist resistance later on. The Nazi administration considered the Seidls unreliable, and so Evžen was barred from studying; he trained as a tool maker. After the war he graduated in geology, married, and moved to Louny. The events of February 1948 and his old ties with Kamil Novotný led the witness to join the resistance organisation MAPAŽ (Masaryk, Palacký, Žižka), which cooperated with the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps - the secret service of the US army). Within the group, he took part in leaflet campaigns, sabotage operations in north Bohemian cities, and helped get fugitives over the borders into West Germany. Evžen Seidl was arrested together with other resistance members. The trial with twenty-three defendants took place from 22 to 14 October 1949 in the Sokol hall in Louny and was inaccessible to the public. The court gave out ten death sentences, of which four were actually executed (Kamil Novotný, Josef Hořejší, Josef Plzák, and Bohumil Klempt). The witness’s sentence was changed to twenty years of high-security imprisonment in the Jáchymov uranium mines. He spent eleven years there, until the 1960 amnesty, when he was released. Upon returning from the labour camp he worked as a tool maker at a porcelain factory. After the Velvet Revolution he was an active member of the Louny branch of the Confederation of Political Prisoners. Evžen Seidl died on 17 January 2017.
