The Mysterious Crimes of Valdice
-three parts-
(part 1)
This was named the best analytical-investigative article of 2013 in the Czech Republic during the country’s annual journalism competition organized by the Open Society Fund-Prague. It originally appeared in Respekt magazine. Awards were handed out in a ceremony in April. This is the first of three parts. – TOL
By the 1970s and 1980s torture and murder were not routine tools of the Czechoslovak regime. Except in one place, about which even to this day not much is known. No one knows its victims, and the perpetrators live quietly among us. We decided to revive the forgotten story and to bring back to the map of Czech history a place that shows what great power does to people and how difficult it is to find earthly justice: the Third Department in Valdice.
In the lock of the cell door, a key rattles and Julius Csanyi looks alert. The tattooed 20-year-old of Slovak-Hungarian origin is no newbie in the division of special surveillance. Originally he was thrown in jail for “bodily harm” – he got into a fight in a pub – but his rebellious nature landed him behind bars for longer than he expected. Twice he attacked a guard and once he tried to escape. So from a regular Slovak prison he worked his way here – to the toughest division within the toughest prison in Czechoslovakia. Within six years he gained enough experience to know that the rattle of keys in the lock after 10 p.m. does not bode well.
It is the end of the 1980s and the situation in the totalitarian country is slowly starting to change. Outside, beyond the walls of the prison there is talk of restructuring and reforms. Not even two whole years remain until the moment when tens of thousands of people openly express disagreement with the ruling regime in the form of “A Few Sentences,” a petition demanding basic freedoms. Shortly after, the communist empire collapses forever. However, here in the Third Department of Valdice, a strange building built on the side of a former monastery complex, nothing is changing. Perforated sheets of metal cover the windows, letting only minimal light into the unheated cells. The prisoners share their scant food rations with rats, and unexpected guard visits usually have a predictable reason.
“The guards came inside. There were three of them, I remember that,” recalls the former criminal in a Prague restaurant a quarter century after the event took place. With his crew cut, leather pants, and tattooed arms, Csanyi still seems menacing, even though he cut ties with the criminal world five years ago and now supports himself honestly. All together he spent 19 years in prison, most of it for fights, shootings, or weapons possession. The day in question, he said, “They sent me outside in the hallway and they stayed in the cell with a boy who shared it with me. They came there like that often. I could hear how they were beating him brutally. I don’t know how long it took, maybe 20 minutes, maybe longer. At times like that you don’t pay attention to time.”
Csanyi sips black coffee and packs a cigarette with cheap tobacco. His memory is poor: after years spent taking drugs and in prison, he does not recall the name of his former cellmate. He was smaller, he says, about “50 kilos [110 pounds], even with his shoes.” He was sent to the special division for harassing the warden’s wife with rude letters. That, too, is why he had the guards’ attention. “Then the guards came out and one of them handed me a cigarette,” Csanyi remembers. “I didn’t take it; smoking was forbidden in the cell. I said to myself, ‘I’ll take one and then they’ll kill me right away.’ ”
Csanyi returned to his cell and searched in the dim light for his cellmate. Then he understood the reason for the unusual generosity. The windows were high above the floor, covered from the inside with massive bars. There, a helpless body with a rag noose around the neck was hanging. Behind Csanyi on the floor a pack of cigarettes hit the floor and a guard told him, “Call us in about three hours.” The steel doors slammed and the sound of walking shoes clicking on the floor slowly faded. “I was hopping mad. I screamed that they must be playing a joke,” he recounts. “Then I sat on the bed and smoked one after another.”
This story, to which we will return again, most likely took place in Valdice in the winter of 1987. The building for disciplinary punishments, where Csanyi spent more than a year, saw many similar scenes in the past. A two-story structure with underground solitary confinement cells and two floors of small cells around a gallery, it was built in the mid-19th century, and from the beginning it served to isolate the most serious criminals. During the Nazi protectorate in World War II, it served as an investigation center for the Gestapo, and in the 1950s the security services tortured Catholic priests here.
Valdice and Leopold in what is now Slovakia were the toughest prisons in Czechoslovakia during normalization. The prison warden, Antonin Kyndl, was a committed communist who in the 1950s served in the Interior Ministry police in a forced labor camp. The ruling regime began sending fewer political prisoners here. Rather, the former monastery near Jicin was becoming the primary depository for violent thieves, sexual deviants, rapists, and murderers. The building of disciplinary punishments, therefore, served as something like a “Valdice within Valdice” – a place where a judge or the prison management placed uncontrollable, dangerous, or otherwise troublesome prisoners. The reasons for being placed here were numerous: here you could find aggressive psychopaths who attacked others and those who tried to escape, but also people who complained too much, talked back to the guards, or did not fulfill their work quotas.
Most of the occupants of the Third Department were repeat criminals. Of course, after their return to freedom, these outcasts living on the fringes of society were not going to rush to write about goings on in the prison for Radio Free Europe. Instead they often fell into the revolving door of more crime and punishment.
So outside the prison walls not much is known about the “House of Horror,” as the Third Department was dubbed by one of the few political prisoners who passed through it from the beginning of the 1970s, Milan Hubl, a historian. But even in the 1970s and 1980s the prevailing conditions here were comparable with the Great Terror of the 1950s: daily beatings, mysterious prisoner suicides, hunger, and cold. When in 1989 a banner was hung out, appearing in photographs from revolutionary-era Valdice and reading “Destroy the Third Division,” only a few citizens of the newly free Czechoslovakia had any idea what it meant. “And that hasn’t changed to this day,” says Ivan Ruzicka, a former prisoner who during the revolution became the main speaker for the inmates. “When I tell people about the former Valdice, they don’t want to believe me.”
FAMILY
When an inmate found himself “behind the metal sheets,” as was the disciplinary building was called for its closed-in windows, becoming acquainted with the rules involved a certain ritual. “The guards welcomed everyone with a beating in the receiving room,” remembers Jiri Wolf, another political prisoner sent there at the end of the 1970s. “The prisoner had to strip naked and bend over into a 45 degree angle. One guard sat astride on his head and other beat him with a strong leather belt across his butt and his back. Gypsies got 20 blows, whites 15. Everyone had to count themselves and if someone messed up, they began again from the beginning. Those who wet themselves from the pain, had to lick everything off of the floor. I also had to lick up my own urine.”
A two-year sentence for robbing a convenience store could be extended to 20 years here.
Beatings with batons and belts were a part of the daily life. Another favorite form of punishment was the so-called “polisher” a heavy bin with a brush attached, normally used for polishing a floor. The guard sat on top of it and the prisoner had to push the load around the floor here and there until he fell from exhaustion.
“They were sadists,” Csanyi says. “You weren’t allowed to sit down in your cell. They would immediately beat you if you did. So all day you walk around and in the evening you drop from exhaustion. You fall asleep immediately and in the night all of a sudden a furious police dog with a muzzle over its mouth jumps on your head. You can’t imagine these kinds of blows.”
Alcohol played a big role in the Third Department. Among the guards it continually flowed and colleagues from other parts of the prison came to join them during shift changes. They considered it a diversion. “They drank a lot and then they beat the inmates for fun,” Ruzicka recalls. “There in the Third everyone acted the worst, even the guards who would not dare to act this way elsewhere.”
The socialist prison system gave convicts the opportunity to complain about the behavior of the members of the Corps of Corrections; the outside had a formal oversight procedure. However, reality was different. The guards of Valdice were like a family. They lived in the same village, went to the same pubs, their families worked in the jail for generations. They would always support one another. Milan Janca, another political prisoner, tried to complain about the superintendent, Vlastimil Michalek. “He sprayed mace into my eyes, he tripped my bound feet when I walked, and to top it off, he often kicked me with all his strength in my coccyx,” recounts the former dissident, who still suffers health problems from his time in Valdice.
The records of the investigation of Janca’s complaints from 28 November 1977 demonstrate how much good it did a prisoner to call for help. “In his complaint he tried to bluntly defame the superintendent – that he beats them with a baton and with his fists, he trips up their legs, which is not based on truth,” the investigator, a Captain Sveda, writes. “It’s a matter of a convicted psychopath who hates the socialist order and the SNV [Corrections] members.” The result of the complaint: 15 days in solitary confinement for the complainers.
During normalization the Third Department became the terror of all Valdice, and not only because of torture. The house of horror hid one more threat: for some there was no path back.
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Read more: www.tol.org
The Mysterious Crimes of Valdice
(part 2)
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