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August 28th, 2008

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Stránský honors comrades in arms

Former prisoner keeps friends' memories alive at communist-era grave

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 28th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Association of Former Political Prisoners head Stanislav Stránský, 84, calls himself a MUKL, an acronym for a "man designated for liquidation" in communist Czechoslovakia.

THE STRÁNSKÝ FILE

Name: Stanislav Stránský
Age: 84
Birthplace: Bratislava
Imprisoned: 194960
Family: Married, two children
Occupation: Chairman, Association of Former Political Prisoners (SPKV)

It has been 48 years since someone last heaved an anonymous body into one of the 5-by-2-meter ditches on the outskirts of the Ďáblice cemetery, but the convex partitions between the mass graves still remain visible.

Walled off from the rest of the graveyard by a row of rosebushes and hedges, a neat grid of headstones now covers the mossy patch of earth that once served as a dumping ground for 207 tortured and executed political prisoners.

On the 18-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, 84-year-old Stanislav Stránský saunters through the abandoned burial ground, picking up overturned flowerpots and adjusting the flickering candles near the headstones.

“When I first came here in 1989, this place was a bush,” he says, motioning to the dense thicket behind the cemetery wall. “There was nothing here, just holes in the ground where our friends were deplorably deposited.”

Stránský himself is no stranger to the Orwellian treachery of Stalinist-era prisons. For 10 years, he braved brutal beatings, interrogations and backbreaking work in forced labor camps. To this day, he calls himself a MUKL, an acronym for “man designated for liquidation” and a term political prisoners in the 1950s used to describe themselves.

Since 1990, he has been chairman of the Association of Former Political Prisoners (SBPV) and the chief force behind the rehabilitation of the Ďáblice burial ground for the victims of the 1950s Czechoslovak communist regime.

Solemn work

A hard-shelled gentleman with soulful brown eyes, Stránský walks between the headstones with ritual solemnity. When he speaks about his decades-long quest to honor those who lie buried here, his baritone voice quakes with emotion.

“All of this is done out of love and respect for the executed,” he says, pausing in front of the commemorative plaque near the cemetery’s main gate. “This all is a monument in their honor.”

Organized chronologically according to date of execution, the modest headstones are uniformly engraved with simple gold lettering.

“It’s important that the graves all have the same sort of look,” Stránský says. “These people were officers, workers and intellectuals, but they were all executed the same way — the noose was the same for everyone.”

A narrow path separates the mass graves from another haunting memorial: The meadow here is also dotted with flower pots, and the dates of birth and death on the minute, white headstones are often just days apart. They mark the graves of 37 children born in 1950s communist prisons.

“Not all of these children are the babies of political prisoners, but that doesn’t matter,” Stránský says. “We took them under our wing because they were born behind bars — in captivity.”

Preserving the past

Although mass graves first came to his attention nearly 40 years ago, Stránský wasn’t able to begin mending the burying ground until after the fall of communism.

“We had to tear through the brambles to get here,” he says. “Some of the victims’ relatives that heard about this place had placed makeshift crosses from rags and twigs in the ground.”

Even after the Iron Curtain fell, Stránský struggled to obtain the permits and funds to rehabilitate the area.

“After 1989, the government was still full of Bolsheviks, so I went through a lot of trouble to prove to public officials that doing this made sense — that it was something worth preserving for future generations,” he says. “The [cemetery keeper] wanted to bulldoze the place.”

Undaunted by this hostility, Stránský went to work. He tore out the overgrowth with his bare hands and wrote letters to “everyone from the president to the last deputy” to obtain aid for the project. In the end, he was able to transform the crass dumping ground into a respectable memorial.

“[Former President Václav] Havel has been here twice,” he says, pausing before a tall, black-marble cross that dominates the graveyard. “Once when we unveiled this, the second time when he was leaving his post.”

But not all luminaries have graced the memorial with their presence — a fact that had not gone unnoticed by the ever-watchful Stránský.

“The current president [Václav Klaus] hasn’t shown up yet, and, although I invite him every year, neither has [Prague Archbishop Miloslav] Vlk,” he says. “No Bolshevik is allowed to come here. That’s why he won’t come.”
Extraordinary circumstances

Stránský describes himself as an ordinary person.

“I’ve always done simple, honest work to make a living, which is the greatest capital a person can have,” he says.

Born in Bratislava and “christened by the Morava River,” he was forced to move to Prague with his Czech father in 1938, when a fear of Hitler caused Slovaks to distance themselves from their “Czech brothers.”

At 15, Stránský attended an International Students’ Day protest against Nazi occupation that left Jan Opletal, a medical student, dead.

“We were flipping over cars and trams to barricade ourselves so the Nazis couldn’t get to us,” he recalls.

During World War II, Stránský was drafted to join the Protectorate government, where he remained until 1946. That year, shortly after the end of the war, the Communist Party emblem started appearing on military uniforms. Appalled by the political affiliation of the traditionally neutral military, Stránský, a 24-year-old sergeant, told his men to tear the symbols off.

“If they would have listened to me and just taken them off, it would have been fine,” he says. “But they didn’t just take them off — they destroyed them, and that’s when the trouble started.”

Stránský was immediately stripped of his rank and court-marshaled.

“I didn’t want to leave the service, but when a superior told me I had lost all chances of promotion, I realized I had no choice,” he says.

Upon returning to civilian life, Stránský worked for the Health Ministry, participating in international campaigns to prevent infant mortality and tuberculosis.

“In 1948, the local branch of the [Communist Party] accused [United Nations aid group] UNESCO of vaccinating people against communism, and the Danes and Norwegians that were working here with us were forced to leave the country,” he says. But the damage was done — Stránský now had contacts in the West.

Lured by rumors of a foreign-based resistance movement against the communist regime, he was able to cross the border and arrange a safe passage to West Germany, where he was placed in a refugee camp. After a two-month screening process, Stránský received political refugee status and a job at the International Refugee Organization.

But his life in exile was not to last. After spending months in limbo, he began to grow restless.

“I couldn’t just sit in Germany with my arms folded,” he says. “It was time for me to act.”

Thirsty for action, Stránský chose his own mission: “My assignment was to return to Czechoslovakia, find my contact and hand him secret information. And I completed it.”

But it would be decades before he would be able to return to Germany. In what would prove to be a life-altering mistake, Stránský made a stopover at his parent’s apartment, where he was arrested by the secret police (StB).

The initial arrival to prison was the hardest blow to the psyches of most rookie MUKLs, but, because this was his second arrest, Stránský says he quickly came to terms with the bleak reality.

“Although,” he says, “the welcoming I got in Plzeň was terrible. At that time, you didn’t know who was kicking you. They bashed out all your teeth and left you lying in a pool of blood. But somehow I expected it.”

With his silent resolve, Stránský was able to endure even the toughest moments of the interrogation process.

“When the prosecutor presented me with the death sentence, the irony was that I was asked to sign it,” he says. “I’d never seen anything like it before — I stared at it and told them there was no way in hell.”

In the end, the judge sentenced Stránský to 14 years.

“You come to terms with death as soon as you hear the verdict,” he says. “After that, you don’t fear it.”

For the next 11 years, he was dragged through the country’s macabre labyrinth of correctional facilities.

“They didn’t want to keep a rebel like me in any one place for too long,” he chuckles. But, when asked to describe the conditions within the prison walls, he leans forward, his features darkening: “My dear, do you really want me to describe all those atrocities — those day-to-day insults to human dignity? Let’s put it this way — imagine 10 or 12 people in a standing-room-only hole with nothing but a bucket for personal needs. Then imagine they treated women the same way. Is that enough?”

His tone becomes matter-of-fact as he recalls the morning of the 1950 execution of political activist Milada Horáková. “You could always tell there was going to be an execution because of the dogs. They would start howling, and all you heard was this odd sort of whimper.”

Personal philosophy

Undeterred by the deplorable setting, Stránský says he “made the best of it.” As he migrated from prisons to forced labor in uranium mines, he came in contact with MUKLs who enriched his personal philosophy.

“He’s a person with extraordinarily broad horizons,” says Stránský’s longtime friend Jiří Línek. “As he sat in those jail cells, he often shared the space with some of the nation’s greatest intellectuals, and so the prison gave him its own, special kind of education.”

In 1960, Stránský and his fellow MUKLs were released as a result of a nationwide amnesty. He spent the remainder of his “productive years” laboring as a construction worker. When the 1989 revolution came, he helped organize the MUKLs into an association with political lobbying power.

Despite the tribulations that mark his life, Stránský retains a youthful energy. He remains active as the head of a former political prisoner group, cultivates the Ďáblice burial ground and pursues a degree in philosophy.

“As long as you have a bit of bread, water, and a place to lie down, you’re alive,” he says, “and that’s all that matters.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com

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