Under the influence of drugs
As a member of the Černý lev (Black Lion) Boy Scout organisation, Jaroslav Karl was arrested in September 1952 and driven to a StB office in Plzeň with a hood on his head. He remembers that, along the way, the car stopped somewhere in Šumava. “Suddenly, they asked me: ‘Do you want to take a pee?’ – ‘No, I don’t.’ I thought: ‘Yeah, right, I get off the car, you take me a few steps to the forest, you shoot me and then you say that I was shot trying to escape.’ So I never left the car. The officers swore and one tried to pull me out of the car but I didn’t let him.” He was held in detention at StB in Plzeň for a year. By then, investigators did not hit Jaroslav in interrogation anymore. They used different methods to learn what they wanted to know. Psychological pressure was first. The interrogations would take from morning to evening, six or seven days a week and the same questions were repeated over and over. The witness also suspects that the StB tried to influence him with drugs. For a period of time, interrogations took place in the afternoon instead of in the morning. He would get back to his cell late at night, long after supper. When he asked for food, he was brought a piece of bread and a mess-tin of bluish milk. “I thought the milk was thinned, but it was milk so I drank it all. They would bring it to me in the evenings after the interrogations for several days. One day, I got back from an interrogation and realized that I had been saying and answering exactly the same things that the investigator was saying, but they were not true. Then I thought that maybe they put some chemical in my milk. I started to spill it.” One day, he timed the warden checks incorrectly and a warden saw him spilling the milk. Within a few days, the evening interrogations and blue milk were over, and he was interrogated in the morning again.
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Jaroslav Karl
Father Jaroslav Karl was born June 18, 1929 in Pilsen, but he moved to Klatovy with his parents and sister while he was still a young boy. He studied the elementary and grammar school there. He was a boy scout and during the war and after the coup in February 1948 he was a member of the resistance organization Černý lev (Black Lion), which was led by Josef Anderle. After graduation from grammar school in 1948 he studied theology in the seminary in České Budějovice till the seminary was closed down in 1950. He was not admitted to the Faculty of Medicine, and he therefore took a course in physiotherapy and rehabilitation. In 1951-1952 he served in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions in Libavá and Šternberk near Olomouc. On September 29, 1952 he was arrested by the State Secret Police directly in the barracks and after one year of detention pending trial the military court in Prague sentenced him to 17 years of imprisonment for high treason and espionage. The reasons for his imprisonment were his activity in the scout resistance organization Černý lev and his religious activities. His sister and his brother-in-law Karel Janota were likewise imprisoned. Mr. Karl served his sentence in Leopoldov. In May 1960 he was released in amnesty, but in 1961 he was arrested again, and sentenced for sedition to two years of imprisonment plus the remaining portion of his previous sentence. This time he was interned in the prison in Valdice, where bishop Korec secretly ordained him a priest. After his release in 1965 he did various jobs, mainly as a nurse in psychiatric hospitals, especially in Prague-Bohnice where he worked the longest time. He became involved in the activities of the underground church, and he was secretly preparing seminarians for ordination. He was legally allowed to serve as a priest only after the fall of the communist regime. In 1990-2003 he served as a dean in Bechyně. At present he is retired and he is an active member of the Confederations of Political Prisoners in Klatovy.
