BERLIN – It was a secret work camp of the Czechoslovakian section of the Gulag Archipelago and stood well hidden by walls in the center of the capital Prague. Forced labor on the spot was used to build the gigantic statue of Stalin that dominated the city. Gulag a few minutes by tram from the center, precisely in the northern part, in the park called Letná Park, today the favorite meeting place for peaceful demonstrations by young pro-Europeans and civil society.
For decades nothing was known, not even after the end of communism in 1989: a team of technicians and archaeologists working to check the state of the land of Letná Park and its historical parts after the construction of a tank.
“Carefully demolished when it was no longer needed, it was dismantled and concealed with precision as common criminals do when they eliminate the evidence of their crimes and as it did for many Nazi and Communist extermination camps,” he says. Radio Prague Professor Jan Hasil, of the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences.
It re-emerges as Memories of the subsoil the terrible world narrated by the great Milan Kundera born The joke, the book that revealed it to the world public: the deportees were soldiers of the punitive battalions, i pétépáky (those with black insignia). The same battalions where “politically unreliable young people, to be punished, isolated and re-educated” ended up as forced recruits, as the manuals of the dictatorship and the infamous secret police StB said.
In the “battalions with black insignia” he finished Ludvík, the protagonist of Kundera’s opera-debut. He is forcibly recruited into the punishment wards because, as those who read the book recall, he had written a love letter with an anticommunist joke to a beautiful girl who is a member of the Communist Party. Not only did she not respond to Ludvík’s love, but she also delivered the letter to regime officials.
“It was one of the camps in which not only political prisoners sentenced to long sentences, but also young people enlisted by force in the” black insignia battalions “were sent to forced labor” in the years of the ruthless coup and Stalinist dictator Klement Gottwald, explains a Radio Prague the scholar Vit Fojtek. “Conceived specifically to isolate those elements deemed politically dangerous from society and re-educate them”. Like today in China or North Korea.
I pétépáky of the secret Gulag in the heart of Prague were at least 120, it is not yet known how many years they remained there. They were less unfortunate than other political prisoners, who are estimated to have reached a maximum of 200,000 in total in the “Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic” in the years of Stalinism. Deported to at least 18 “official” camps or secret camps.
The young people of Prague’s secret Gulag had to work hard in inhumane working conditions and at bestial hours to build the huge statue of Stalin which then from 1955 to 1962 dominated Prague from the hill. Other “enemies of socialism” fared much worse: other secret fields of the GuLag were discovered in Bohemia, in the immediate vicinity of a uranium mine. Many political prisoners often worked unprotected to excavate the uranium needed for the Soviet atomic arsenal and then died of cancer.
The GuLag just accidentally spotted by Hasil’s team in Letná Park consisted of at least three 10-by-18-meter shacks, with no heating and no concrete floors. Eight “soldiers with black insignia” were crammed into each small room, working tirelessly and receiving bad food and little or no medical care.
The Czech archaeologists, digging, found the construction plans of the concentration camp and aerial photographs of the time. So they managed to reconstruct a map of the concentration camp. And in the underground they found, as further evidence, remains of the uniforms, work tools and miserable everyday objects of the deportees.
So far, not even after the construction of the huge granite monument to the Soviet tyrant was finished when the Gulag was closed and demolished, nor during the brief season of free atmosphere and reform (the Spring of 1968) crushed in blood by Soviet military aggression, nor after the end of communism, testimonies or memories of former deportees had been collected. It is not known how many of them died of hardship in the camp, but it is assumed that those who came out alive kept the instinct of prudence and the fear of telling stories until death. “Broken lives of young people who could have become academics, engineers, skilled workers, and were often punished only for a suspicion or a crime,” say Czech archaeologists and historians now.
The statue was finished in 1955. The sculptor who was commissioned by the dictatorship to design it, Otakar svec, was horrified by the realization of his own drawing commissioned by force and, overwhelmed by shame, he took his own life a few days before the inauguration of the monument. Which was destroyed with dynamite in 1962 on the orders of Nikita Krusciov, the Soviet dictator of de-Stalinization decided to eliminate all traces of Stalinism and then overthrown in 1964 by the internal coup from the PCUS led by the Orthodox led by Leonid Brezhnev: the one who decided the invasion to crush the “Spring”, sending the Panzers against the young people to Wenceslas Square transformed into a small Tiananmen ante litteram. Now, from the underground of Prague, a dark memory has re-emerged by chance. Memory for young people and future generations.
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