Antonín Otta

* 1928

  • “There was an escape attempt there. From Vykmanov Camp. Of course, it flopped, it wasn’t good at all. They were waiting for them to climb through, they had floodlights trained on the spot where they would come out. Well, and then they started shooting without [warning]. The camp had roll call at two in the night, or one, to get us out into the air a bit. Well, and there were three that they’d killed, they carried them about outside the camp. ‘This is what happens when you try to escape.’ Well, that wasn’t good.”

  • “The lectures were every Sunday, [about] what was going on. The revolution, when they just chased out all the Germans from Prague, the siege of the Radio House. Well, and one man spoke up, saying he knew how it was - there were about four or five hundred of us listening there. It had been said that the Party had decided in what way the Czech Radio - Czechoslovak Radio back then - would be managed, occupied. And I’ll tell you a whopper. [...] ‘Any remarks?’ So one prisoner put his hand up: ‘Here.’ - ‘What have you got to add?’ - ‘That it’s not true.’ And he briefly explained, in ten minutes at most, in what way the Prague radio house was occupied, what went on there. And the cop said: ‘The way I said it is how it happened. You can’t even know anything about it.’ And he said: ‘Yes I can. I was the journalist who broadcast it.’”

  • “Well, for instance, I didn’t see this, but I heard about it. The guards could do whatever [they liked], or if it was a political supervisor, those were even more confident. Say, he’d stand a priest - who otherwise preached at church - on the compost heap. ‘You’ll stand there until you say: “Virgin Mary was a whore.” Well, that priest won’t say it. So [the supervisor] helped him out now and then by smashing him up. Well, and he might have stood there for perhaps twenty hours. And then, just to rub it in, they wouldn’t give him anything to eat for two days.”

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They released me in a flash. In exactly two years

Antonín Otta before an arrest
Antonín Otta before an arrest

Antonín Otta was born in June 1928 in Brodek, Jičín District, but after World War II he and his family moved to the village of Sedlečko near Karlovy Vary, where they took up an empty house from one of the deported Germans. In 1949 he was accused of seditious activity, although he had done nothing and had never even seen his alleged colleagues in crime. Despite persistently denying all accusations he was sentenced to fifteen years of prison in Pankrác in Prague. He was taken to Jáchymov, where he spent several months. Unlike other prisoners, a supposed medical check made him exempt from mining duties. His case was reopened two years later, when he was freed and allowed to return home.