You’ll all kick the bucket here

Luboš Hruška arrived at the Leopoldov prison, one of the worst in all of Czechoslovakia, in the summer of 1952. The first concern that came up was a change of clothes: “The wardens would take a good shirt or a pullover from the newly arrived and put it on themselves: ‘You’re never going to need this again.’ Chief Bálint greeted us with the following words: ‘This is an elimination camp for you, you’ll kick the bucket here!’ This was the beginning of a genuine elimination camp. Right on the first day they started to treat us so severely – leap frogging, crawling, duck marching – that the elderly gentlemen, old generals, colonels, every other one with heart disease, unsurprisingly fainted after a while. They poured water over one of them, woke him up and yelled, ‘Three hundred squats!’ The only number they knew was three hundred. Of course, after doing three or four squats he would faint again. So, that was the beginning of our elimination camp,” he recalled. Mr. Hruška spent the first year alone in his cell. The prisoners suffered from the wardens’ bullying and from a lack of food: “For lunch we had a handful of horse beans, for dinner a handful of potato mush. All in all, after three months we had all lost 25 to 30 kilos.” Luboš Hruška did not leave his cell for a whole year: “Five steps back and forth – you have to walk, you can’t stop, you can’t sit down, you can’t lie down. From six to nine o’clock. You’re hungry, tired, exhausted, so some of the lads sat or layed down. But they were sent straight to correction, which meant no food for two days, and only half a portion of food on the third day .”