There was no gun left for me

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Karel Kukal along with ten other prisoners tried to escape from Shaft 14 of Camp XII. on 15 October 1951. He was shot in the knee during the attempt. “There was no gun left for me. I knew that if the guards were to get me alive, things would be real bleak for me. So I made an arrangement with some of the others in the sense that they would keep one bullet for me, as the worst case scenario. But then a guard appeared on a hill behind us, everybody was surprised and they ran the other way. They didn’t realize that I was left there. When I knew that I couldn’t walk much farther and heard the forest being searched in the distance, I put my belt around my neck. I hanged myself on a branch, but it broke. That’s how I stayed alive. By then, they got near so I had no time left to try again. I definitely didn’t want them to take me alive.” Karel Kukal was later caught in a forest southwest of the Stanovice community.

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Karel Kukal

Karel Kukal was born in 1927 Prague in a family of a businessman. He studied at a grammar school. After the events of February 1948, he actively participated in the third resistance. After 1945, he became a member of the youth organization of the Czech National Social Party because if its anti-communist doctrines. They published a journal, distributed newsletters and white ballots before the election in 1948. He was arrested and sentenced in a trial together with Milan Choc to seven years in prison. On 15th October 1951 he was one of the prisoners who escaped from the shaft number 14 at Horní Slavkov. The escape wasn't successful and Karel Kukal was caught the next day and sentenced to another 25 years in prison. In 1968, he emigrated to Switzerland where he was one of the founding members of the exile Scout Movement. He wrote a book about the escapes from the mines at Jáchymov, called Ten Crosses. He lives in Bern.

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Stanovice

Available in: English | Česky

The location where the escape attempt of prisoners from camp XII Horní Slavkov had failed lies southeast of the village of Stanovice. The prisoners had escaped on the night of October 14th 1951. František Čermák managed to get away from the encirclement but he was later shot when he was trying to cross the state border near Malacky. Miroslav Hasil was one of the other escapees; he managed to get all the way to Dolní Bojanovice, where he was later arrested by the State Security. Out of the total of eleven escapees only Karel Kukal and Zdeněk Štich had survived, all the others were either shot during their attempt to escape or sentenced to death.

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There was no gun left for me

Karel Kukal