Like my favorite trip of the semester to Southern Bohemia, my second favorite trip was also just a few hours away from Prague and a last minute decision to attend. The trip was created for students in the Central European Studies program, also facilitated by CET, to give students a personal tour of the Jachymav labor camps and uranium mines, one of the darkest chapters of Czech history. I had very little idea what to expect and I walked away with the most meaningful and profound experience of my semester.
We left Prague on Saturday morning with our tour guide for the weekend, Jicha, who is currently spearheading an effort to increase visibility of the use of political prisoners in the labor camps in the decade after World War II. After studying oral history, Jicha eventually served as the Director of Communications for the Ministry of Education and now teaches at NYU Prague. His grandfather was sent to a concentration camp during Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and after surviving that horrible ordeal, was then sent to one of the Jachymav labor camps for supporting anti-communist ideals.
During my travels, I have not taken a trip to any of the former concentration camps, even though I had been presented with a few opportunities. Certainly, I have learned a bit about these horrific places, the events leading up to them, the damage they caused, and their lasting impact, but I was not sure if I was ready to confront them in person. On the other hand, I knew almost nothing about labor camps in the Soviet Union, other than I knew they existed and were also horrible. Because I knew I had so much more to learn and there would not be another opportunity like this, I decided to attend the Jachymav trip. I did not, however, anticipate how much it would affect me.
After arriving in Jachymav, we toured one of the mine shafts that was first used for silver mining, like in Kutna Hora, but was transformed into a uranium mine immediately after WWII. The Soviet Union was struggling to catch up to the United States in the atomic weapons race, and their large number of tests and experiments required large amounts of uranium ore. Mines in the Jachymav region produced almost half of the uranium used in Soviet experiments and weapons before approximately 1975. There was no expensive machinery designed to expedite the process. Instead, prisoners worked 10-12 hours a day in the mine planting explosives, detonating them deep in the shafts, clearing the exploded material, and separating the valuable ore from the rest of the rock. Inside the mines was one of the only places where prisoners had a small degree of freedom and the only place where they interacted with members of the outside world. Prisoners would befriend the civilian laborers and workers and attempt to send letters and gifts home to their families. Even though the mine was the only place where there were no guards, the prisoners were forced to work at an excruciating pace, having to meet a daily quota in order to receive their rations that day. If prisoners consistently underperformed, they were held in solitary confinement, beaten, or killed.
After leaving the mine, we hiked the memorial knowledge trail which Jicha and his organization created. The trail is a large loop, with numerous stops along the way including three sites where the camps once stood. Now, there is hardly any evidence of the terrible events that happened there. The Communist government wanted to remove all traces of the camps, destroying the foundations, fences, and crude barracks. The only remaining structure is a small concrete bunker that served as the cells for solitary confinement. In a twisted way, I found this to be a strangely comforting part of the experience. Even though terrible and inhumane crimes were committed on that very ground only 50 years ago, nature has reclaimed the space. Tall trees, full bushes, and grass cover the countryside. If it were not for the small plaques that made up the knowledge trail, it would be impossible to know about these events.
However, people have also reclaimed the space. At the site of one of the processing facilities, summer homes now dot the hillside, many of the residents themselves ignorant of history of the region. It is incomprehensible to me how these people could live their lives, play with their kids, and eat dinner just yards away from the site of such terrible suffering. Part of the problem, Jicha described, is the communists were successful at hiding their crimes. They interrogated individuals in secret prison facilities, abducted people from their homes without official record in the dead of night, and imposed strict penalties on anyone speaking out.
The day after finishing the hike, we had the honor to meet a survivor of the labor camps. After moving cities and changing his name to avoid serving in the Czech military, he was eventually tracked down and forced to serve for three years. During this time, many Czechs believed the United States would continue past Germany and would liberate Czechoslovakia from Soviet control. With this in mind, him and a small group of friends began cataloging any information that might be useful to American troops when they finally arrived. Two years after serving his time, he was abducted from his home in the middle of the night by Communist police. One of the members of his friend group that had conspired with him sold out the other members, likely for a cash reward. He was taken to a secret prison and interrogated for two weeks, beaten, and prevented from sleeping. He became so worn down and delirious that he began giving in to the interrogators demands to confess to crimes he did not commit. He was convicted and sent to work in the Jachymav mines, where he was imprisoned for six years until the point the labor camps were closed in the late 1950s.
He shared many heartbreaking stories describing the treatment of prisoners, the evil methods used by the communist government, and how the events robbed an entire generation of cultural, religious, and political leaders. There are too many to go into detail here, but the story that had the greatest impact on me is the story of the famous Czech sculptor, Peter Schlesinger, who was imprisoned for making art that was too ‘Western’. He was approached by Communist leaders to make the official bust for the first Czech President but he refused. Eventually, he was convinced by the communist officials that he would be granted his freedom if he created the bust. After finishing the bust, instead of returning to his family, he was sent back to the labor camps, this time to the uranium processing facility where the uranium ore was refined into smaller and smaller pieces. The process of crushing the uranium made the conditions especially toxic and most prisoners developed lung and skin cancer within just a few months. Schlesinger died just three months after returning to the camp.
Hearing first hand from a survivor of this awful period is an experience I will never forget. He talked so earnestly about these issues and was able to describe them in simple yet terrifying detail. What has stuck with me the most is being able to understand just how barbaric the idea of political prisoners is. All of the freedoms we enjoy under the First Amendment were nonexistent in his time. People were convicted, jailed, and forced into labor camps for offenses such as listening to jazz or reading American authors. Priests and bishops were framed for staging coups against the communist regime and sent to the camps. Not only were these people innocent of any legitimate crimes, they were engaging in the fields that make society flourish and progress. The kind of persecution I witnessed is distinct from the persecution carried out by Nazi Germany, but it is in the same vein: the dehumanization of people based on their beliefs, identity, and thoughts. I was deeply saddened to learn about Jachymav and all it represents, but it has made me realize that this kind of discrimination is easier to recognize and combat. It is overt and it is ruthless. Other kinds of dehumanization and persecution continue to occur, but it is more veiled and hidden. Still, this trip has disgusted me by displaying the kind of extreme evil that can happen when stop seeing the humanity in others.