Be sure that people who tortured and killed people (soldiers, correction officers, mobsters, and freed criminals) are walking down the street. The small town of Jičín is no exception. Walking along the basswood alley built by then the most powerful man in Europe Albrecht von Wallenstein, you will get into Valdice which is a small town with a long tradition of imprisoning people.
Opened in 1856, the prison had the privilege of housing the most brutal criminals from the most distant places of then Austrian-Hungarian Empire. So given the fact that the humanization of prisons happened later on (long after they realized that torture doesn’t work as a deterrent), it experienced a lot of unimaginable torture. The Stalinist-like approach endured into the last years of the communist regime.
Spartakiáda was a huge communist sporting feast hosted in Prague and attended by 1.5 million people. But it turned into a nightmare when 11 sexual assaults and 3 murders happened. The communist police, back then with far more than excellent results likely due to forced confessions started looking for a man responsible for them. He had been elusive and had an IQ of 125. But he was 16 years old! The woman menace who brutally tortured and killed his victims was named Jiří Straka.
Given the public awareness of how the communist regime treated its prisoners, his parents wanted him to be given the death penalty. But no, he was given 10 years sentence. And he had gone through hell!
He was brutalized by fellow inmates but notably by correction officers. But even some other inmates felt pity for him. Forced to drink his own urine and blood, he was mock-executed, starved, left in a cold cell, brutally beaten almost to death, poured on with boiling water, and then finally one of the COs proclaimed: “You are alive but you’re not gonna have intercourse anymore!” His testicles were kicked with such power that he underwent castration.
One prisoner was being beaten, lost his temper, and started beating the CO. He tried to run across the ward with the alarm ringing. He was caught and he uttered: “They will kill me and I am not going to be the first one and the last one!”
He woke up in the morning, he didn’t see anything, had to crack his eyelids filled with blood, his teeth dangled from gums, but he survived.
The COs’ tactics were to beat the prisoner to death and then hang him making it appear as a suicide. Doctors were accomplices with their falsified death certificates.
The COs were open about their intention, not hiding that they could kill you. A robbed store as a petty crime turned into death in Valdice.
Václav Havel, commonly mentioned as a man who deserved a Nobel Peace Prize (and he strongly sought it during his life), was also a prisoner. However, even the worst murderers had a protective hand on him as he was imprisoned because of though crimes.
The funny thing is that even communists were humanists in theory. Torture was prosecutable with long sentences. And the COs had known it.
When the revolution was occurring and even the most feeble-minded COs started to have a clue, the prisoners that had much information must have died.
So there were prosecutions after the Velvet Revolution with no results. The former inmates were unreliable and the officers had good lawyers.
So when walking the streets of Jičín, you encounter people who inflicted pain so severe to the point of being unbearable or that directly killed people. Corrections officers, soldiers, freed criminals, or mobsters.
After this bestiality, being so humanistic was arguably overdone by one the most prominent dissidents in the Eastern Block Václav Havel. He decided to declare a general amnesty. 23 000 prisoners were released
A released thug got hired as a clinical assistant in a hospital. Then he raped and strangled to death a seven-month baby girl. Havel was allegedly crying when he met the baby’s family. And more and more murders happened.
While various proven accounts provide the details that Havel loved alcohol binges, he was also a woman’s man with a complicated intimate life. But unlike President Miloš Zeman, he managed his love of alcohol separate from politics.
The Czech Republic has an ugly history with presidential amnesties. Former president Václav Klaus declared general amnesty which has seen 6 471 prisoners released affecting the lives of 114 000 people. Not only that some go and murdered people, but the act was heavily criticized because a lot of financial criminals benefited from it.
Since the disadvantages of restored capitalism came into play, the violence transferred from now more humanistic prisons to very households. The organized crime phenomenon came into existence and some members were telling the public that even the hardest men were crying when being tortured.
Not only Jičín’s streets are full of former COs, but human nature is so complex. I have definitely met a few of them. Some were evil, but suddenly became friendly when they learned I had mental illnesses. Some of them were the most evil but appeared gently, sometimes rapidly became enraged.
The dark side of humanity is that absolute power makes evil, but these COs were far from having absolute power (they couldn’t have said to their employer that all prisoners were dead one day) so this makes our imagination of the human mind far more appalling.
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