CZECH REPUBLIC: POLITICAL PRISONERS

Michal Louč and Tomáš Bouška report on ‘Political Prisoners’ a Prague-based, cross-disciplinary, unsubsidized research project.
‘The primary purpose of the project is to collect, analyze and disseminate the life stories of political prisoners who survived jailing in Stalinist prisons and working camps in the former Czechoslovakia and other European countries. Most of our narrators were jailed in the 1950s and 1960s but their traumatic experiences continued after they were released from prison and inevitably affected their families. We think their life stories can enrich our view of the Czechoslovak socialist dictatorship with new perspectives.
‘Our team of volunteers is made up of students (mostly PhD candidates) from various universities and science fields including history, psychology and social anthropology. We hold historical conferences, youth workshops, and compile the Czechoslovak Political Prisoners anthology to enable these stories to cross the globe.
‘We use the website www.politicalprisoners.eu to share the authorized transcripts of interviews and multimedia resources with the public. Our offline archive is also available at the Oral History Center in Prague. We have collected thirty-five life stories so far and recently had ten of those translated into English for the website.
‘One of our current projects is K.Ch. – The story of a female political prisoner, a documentary on the story of a young woman raped, impregnated, and forced to give birth to her prison guard’s child in a former Czechoslovakian prison in 1948. She met her daughter more than fifty years later and both of them appear in the film. The film introduces Karla Charvatová, a strong and level-headed woman who was able to overcome tragedy and fight for her life under severe and unfair circumstances. The opening night of the documentary was on the 17 November 2011 at a cinema in Prague. About 250 people came to the opening night where Mrs Charvátová, director Tomáš Bouška and historian Tomáš Herajt were available for discussion. Currently we are working on producing an English subtitled version of the documentary.’
• For more information on the project please visit www.politicalprisoners.eu or contact Michal Louč at: michal.louc@politicalprisoners.eu

source: ORAL HISTORY, Spring 2012, p. 28