Walk! Hands! Stop sleeping!

Vladimír Hradec was arrested, like many others who had been helping the Mašín brothers before their escape. The State Security picked him off the street on November 25th, 1953 and took him to the prison in Ruzyně. Vladimír Hradec considers himself lucky for being arrested after the deaths of Gottwald and Slánský. The interrogation was not as brutal as it had been before: “The most cruel Gestapo-like methods, which were ordered by comrade Slánský, as I’d heard, were replaced by psychological pressure.” Mr Hradec was not tortured and beaten like many prisoners before him. But he could not avoid psychological pressure. “They used the method of a lack of sleep. They would put us in a dark cell after each interrogation. There was always a person sitting behind the cell door whose task was to make sure the prisoner wouldn’t fall asleep,” he recalled. Whenever a prisoner would stop walking in his cell during the day, a loud kick in the door and the order: “Walk!” would follow. The prisoners could sleep only during a set period of time, lying on their back with their hands crossed on their blanket. It was cold in the cells, the blankets were light, and so it was not easy to sleep. He remembered: “When your hands are cold, you instinctively put them under the blanket. In a moment, you could hear someone kick the door and shout: ‘Hands!’.” If a situation like this repeated itself several times, the prisoner had to hand his blanket over, and walk for an hour: “After a week or two ‘you’re sleeping wherever you are’.” The interrogatees had to put up with a torrent of questions and the interrogators shouting. The prisoners would fall asleep in each quiet moment, but they would be woken up by shouting. It was easy for a person to say something they did not want to say at all: “They would write down each word and move on to the next prisoner. They would tell him what they found out from the previous prisoner. That way the prisoner said something he didn’t want to say. So during two or three weeks they knew everything.”