ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and interprets the experiences of twelve active opponents of the Stalinist regime in the late 1940s and 1950s in Czechoslovakia, who were eventually caught, subjected to brutal interrogations and subsequently condemned to long-term political imprisonment in labour camps in an attempt to silence them. Interviews with these individuals were conducted by the Political Prisoners Initiative of young Czech historians between 2008 and 2010, with the aim of commemorating stories of former political prisoners in the 1950s in Czechoslovakia in order to keep them in the Czech cultural memory. The Stalinist system labelled our narrators as enemies of the state, who therefore 'deserved' such treatment. Interrogation had two goals: the first goal was to destroy any resistance that there could be to the implementation of the totalitarian system. The unsafe social environment did not allow this. True reconciliation could only begin after the end of the Cold War.
