All was written and encrypted on cigarette papers

While in the Vykmanov I. camp, Antonín Husník set up cannonball connection with the free world by a happy accident. It started with the breakdown of a coal conveyor belt, which the prisoner team used for loading coal onto railway cars at the Ostrov train station. Husník had to repair the conveyor, working high above the ground. “While I was up there, a person I knew from the military, one Staff Captain Baloušek with his wife passed by with a child in a pram," he recalls. Mrs. Baloušková knew Antonín Husník from a meeting after the war and recognized him. He did not notice the family, though. When the prisoners received churns of milk later, he got unexpected mail. He remembers: “The lady in the storage slipped me a parcel. There was a message in it that said it was for Antonín Husník, and it asked that he give the lady that handed him the parcel a message about himself. So I replied.” This laid the foundation for a long-term communication channel outside the camp. The storage woman was a distant relative of Mrs. Baloušková and she facilitated the cannonball connection. Husník even came up with encryption for the messages: “I was a trained paratrooper, so I prepared everything quite well. The communication worked for more than a year and then at the Nikolai camp where we were transferred later. Everything was written on cigarette papers.” The prisoners were primarily able to contact their families this way, as Husník states, “[they] had this simple table which, when positioned over the text, made it readable. Without the table, it was just a mess of block letters.” Messages were not the only things trafficked to and from the camp. Husník was even able to get a compass and a map for a runaway, Jaroslav Ubránek.