The sergeant major was capable of hitting you with the force of a truck

The State Security had come to get Antonín Husník at the end of May 1950, he was interrogated at the infamous Little House. During the interrogation itself, beating was apparently quite rare, but if someone refused to cooperate then they would be taken over by interrogator Pergl and sergeant major Malý. “They would always call out: ‘Take him upstairs, he can’t remember anything again.’ Sarge Malý was into physical violence. When he slapped you it felt as if you got hit by a truck.” However, in the Little House they also used psychological torture. “My wife was in a maternity hospital at the time. They threatened to imprison her and send my child off for upbringing. “If you don’t talk, they’ll have a hard time.” Husník thought of a way how to find relief in the tough conditions. “Staff captain Bohata was interrogating me. He wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what he wanted to hear. He thought I was refusing to speak. So I told him that I would write everything down. One of the psychological forms of pressure in the Little House was that the prisoners had to walk all day. We had to march all day and then in the evening the interrogation would start and it would last until dawn. So I decided to tell them I would write everything down because that way I could sit down. I got a pile of paper and I kept writing about the same things over and over. What I would have been able to say in two sentences I wrote down on two A4s. Bohata soon realized I was making fun of him. So I got beaten up quite a bit by Malý.”