I’ll leave you alone

In 1956, Bohumil Robeš was imprisoned in the Leopoldov prison for anti-Communist activities. In that year, Hungary saw a major revolt against the Communist dictatorship and the Soviet occupation. The prison warders and the leadership of the prison were very nervous that the Hungarian events might spread to Czechoslovakia as well. However, instead of contemplating about their own deeds, they further increased their brutality towards the inmates of the prison, who were sent to the correction for every triviality. Bohumil Robeš was sent to the correction as well by the chief of the prison Ján Kaňuch. However, Mr. Robeš spoke out openly and protested against this – a very courageous and rare act in those days. “We waited for the report that was held by the chief of the work shift or the chief of the prison. They handed out three, five, or seven days in the correction. You could see it in the eyes of those wardens that they were afraid something might happen to them. I told them that the Communists and prison warders will be held responsible for their crimes and that the Communist party will be tried for the things it had committed here. They plunged themselves on me and put me in a straightjacket and tied my feet and hands together, then they put me in the correction cell for ten hours straight. The rats were crawling all over me. But even that rat, when it crawled out of the toilet, gave me a look as if it was saying: ‘I’ll leave you alone’ and it crawled back into the toilet. I was in the jacket. After some time, the muscles relax. They handcuffed me in such a way that my hands were tied to my feet. At first, you wet yourself. Then you defecate on yourself and so on and so on. After a while, you feel nothing anymore. When the excrements dry on your body like glue, it feels the way it feels. I sang, I recited poems, I composed poems and I cursed them,” he recalled. Six months later, Mr. Robeš was sentenced to another five years in prison for his protests to the wardens.