Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  Construction of Pankrác was started in July of 1885 and completed in August of 1889, the site at that time outside the city limits. In 1926 a large court building was added to the facility, connected to the prison by an underground tunnel still in use today. 1926 was also the year that the prison was approved as an execution ground, at that time conducted by hanging. On December 6, 1930, the first prisoner to be executed in Pankrác did the crazy legs dance at the end of a rope, and between that time and 1938, five more prisoners died by the noose. Everything would change in Pankrác in 1939 though, with the abrupt arrival of the Third Reich in Prague. Pankrác, like virtually every other government-run institution and building in then Czechoslovakia, was seized by the Nazis. The court building housed the Nazi “court,” and the Gestapo’s Special “Investigation” (i.e., interrogation by torture) Unit did their gruesome work within the prison. The Czech prison guards were quickly replaced by men far more suited to the brutality that was about to ensue, members of the infamous Waffen-SS, Hitler’s elite police force that was the military arm of the Nazi party itself. Many members of the SS were later convicted as war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials, and the Waffen-SS itself was classified as a criminal organization due to its intimate ties with (and hideous activities carried out for) the Nazi Party. During the German occupation, thousands of Czechs were imprisoned in Pankrác—normal citizens, Resistance fighters, black marketeers, religious leaders, political figures, intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians.

  From early 1939 until the spring of 1943, inmates were being held in the prison until they were shipped off to either prisons within Germany, various concentration camps, or execution grounds outside of Pankrác itself. However in early April 1943, in a display of the ruthless efficiency typical of the Nazis, executions began to be carried out within the prison’s walls. Why bother to send these innocent people all the way to der Vaterland when the Czechs could be greased for a lot cheaper in Prague? Pankrác already possessed a functional gallows, which was employed to execute an unknown number of prisoners on site during the German occupation. However, stringing someone up, dropping them, then removing their body and preparing the rope again for the next terrified victim was too time-consuming and just too much work for the Gestapo—more than likely some SS man complained about the backache he had gotten after lifting body after body as his co-worker removed the noose from yet another Czech stiff. Bullets cost way too much money to waste on executing these people, so, for a solution to their conundrum, the Nazis looked to another group of people they were currently kicking the shit out of: the French. Somewhere on the Left Bank of occupied Paris, a Nazi Party official was skimming happily through an illustrated book on the French Revolution, and inspiration struck. He rang up Prague for a chat with his old college drinking buddy from engineering school, and Voilà! La Guillotine arrived in Pankrác.

  Between April 5, 1943 and April 26, 1945, prisoners were decapitated by the guillotine in one of three cells outfitted for this purpose, primarily in cell #1087, known cheerfully as “the axe room.” The guillotine had a basket to catch falling heads; beneath the basket a sheet metal flue ran to a drain in the floor for convenient disposal of all that gushing, messy blood. Near the guillotine was a rack of meat hooks hanging on a track from the ceiling. After a prisoner had been beheaded, their body was simply rolled off the side of the guillotine into a wooden box. Or, I suppose if it was busy day (as I have read in some accounts), the body could be impaled on a hook, then slid a few feet away from the guillotine to make room for the next neck on the chopping block. Imagine that for a second if you will; walking into a room knowing you are about to be decapitated, and the first thing you see is a row of headless bodies hanging on hooks like slabs of beef in a meat locker. Any peace you may have been able to come to with your impending doom would probably be shaken up quite a bit once you entered that real-life chamber of horrors.

  Meticulous notes kept by the head executioner, Alois Weiss, show that 1079 prisoners were beheaded in Pankrác, 175 of which were women. There were generally two execution sessions a week, with five to ten prisoners being beheaded in a row, although on August 4, 1944, Alois must have been in a particularly choppy mood, because twenty-nine people paid their first and last visit to the axe room. An execution took, from start to finish, an average of three minutes. The cells of those condemned to die (some for offenses as minor as slaughtering an extra unreported pig in order to feed their families) were within earshot of the axe room, so the sound of the one-hundred-and-thirty-pound sledge and blade repeatedly slamming home as it severed head after head was quite audible to those awaiting execution. Each week, posters would appear all over the city of Prague, listing those scheduled to die in the axe room. If you saw the name of one of your relatives on that list, you could count on receiving a bill in the mail soon from the Nazi party, along with a note explaining that if you didn’t have the entire sum immediately, not to worry—you were allowed to pay the cost of your loved one’s execution in monthly installments.

  At the end of the war, the Nazis dismantled the guillotine and threw it in the Vltava river in an attempt to hide what they had done in Pankrác. But the Czechs had imprisoned the chief of the Gestapo guards, Paul Soppa, who under intense interrogation revealed the whereabouts of its disposal. The Czechs searched the river, found it, and returned it to Pankrác, where it was reassembled (to this day, the guillotine sits in the Pankrác axe room as a memorial to those who died beneath its blade). The postwar executions of Nazis and Nazi collaborators began, and between 1945 and 1948 one hundred and forty-seven of these people were executed in Pankrác, many of them dying in the very prison they had been the overlords of scant months before. The executioner Alois Weiss escaped to his homeland however, where bizarrely enough he would engage in a long and bitter fight with the German government to grant him a pension for his war-time duties as a “public servant.” In the 1960s, Weiss even had the cold-blooded balls to write the Czech government requesting a letter confirming his activities in Pankrác, so that he could present it as “proof of employment” to the German government.

  I don’t know if the Czechs provided him with this, but I do know, in a stunning display of bureaucratic cowardice and capitulation, that the German government eventually granted him his pension, which he lived off of quite comfortably until his death at the age of eighty in Straubing, Germany. Interviews with Weiss in his later years revealed that he felt no guilt whatsoever for executing over a thousand innocent people—hey, he needed a job, right? Ah, those wacky days under the Third Reich . . .

  In 1948 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power, and the new head cheese, a Stalinist president named Klement Gottwald, managed to dial it back a bit in Pankrác. During his five-year run as the most powerful man in Czechoslovakia, a mere 237 people were executed in the prison, 190 of these for political crimes (such as not being a Communist). Admittedly, Gottwald got a bit heavy-handed with the whole “purging” thing during his presidency, being posthumously awarded the title of “Worst Czech” in a 2005 poll, but the killing in Pankrác certainly didn’t stop when he left office. From 1953, on through the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, and right into the bloody dawn that preceded 1989’s peaceful Velvet Revolution (ending the Communist era of Czechoslovakia), an executioner found gainful employment in the prison. The last person to be put to death in Pankrác (and in what is now called the Czech Republic) was a charming man named Vladimír Lulek who had slaughtered his wife and four children. Besides Lulek, there were a few memorable others who died in Pankrác after taking a little dip in Ye Olde Blood Bath: in 1957 they strung up Václav Mrázek, a sexual predator and spa attendant who murdered at least seven women then burgled their homes (in addition to the murders he was convicted of 127 other crimes). Before being hanged in 1961, the lovely Miss Marie Fikákpvá confessed to killing at least 10 newborn babies—she liked to give them a good wallop or two upside their crying little noggins until they shut up. How did she have access to s
o many of these tiny victims? She was a nurse in the obstetrics department of a hospital, of course.

  My favorite though, is Olga Hepnarová, a mentally ill truck driver who became the last woman to be executed in Pankrác in 1975. Olga hated society (especially her family), so after years of deliberating (she started out writing notes at age sixteen that said “I HATE PEOPLE!”), she decided to do something about it. On a sunny July day in 1973 she picked out a tram stop at the bottom of a hill and gunned it, slamming her massive truck into a crowd of about twenty-five people, killing eight and injuring others. To be fair to Olga, she did write a letter detailing her plan which she sent to not one, but two, different newspapers several days before she put the pedal to the metal. A portion of the letter read thusly:

  I am a loner. A destroyed woman. A woman destroyed by people . . . I have a choice—to kill myself or to kill others. I choose—TO REVENGE MY HATERS. It would be too easy to leave this world as an unknown suicide. The society is too indifferent, rightly so. My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to the death penalty.

  Of course the Czech postal system under the oppressive Communist regime wasn’t exactly the model of efficiency, so the letter didn’t reach the papers until two days after her revenge on her “haters” had already been exacted. Olga was brutal—after wrecking the truck into the people, reportedly she sat calmly in the cab until the cops came, saying, “I did it on purpose!” to any around her who could still listen, and when later asked if she felt remorse for her actions, replied “none.” When it came time for her to face the music she did not go quietly into that good ol’ truck drivin’ night, but fought, vomited, and defecated herself, eventually collapsing and having to be dragged to the Pankrác gallows. Some folks go out kicking and screaming; Olga went out punching, puking, and pooping. You go, girl!

  Total known number of executed people in Pankrác in 123 years: 1,580. The actual number is unknown, as only the deaths by guillotine during the Nazi era were recorded, not those who died from hanging, torture, forcible starvation, or just being beaten to death. Then there are all those who died within the prison walls at the hands of other prisoners, untreated diseases, or suicide. Some of this information I learned upon my release, but much of it I found out while still incarcerated. Pankrác is a spooky, spooky place, and at night I would lay in the dark in my cell, listening for the voices of the thousands who died within its walls.

  Although in 1989 the death penalty went the way of the Communists in the new Czech Republic, Pankrác stayed open for business—why on earth would anyone want to get rid of a perfectly good one-hundred-year-old prison? The first President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, did a bit of time in Pankrác for political dissidence during the Communist era. Havel was a brilliant writer, political reformer, and humanitarian—in 2013 it came to light that he selflessly refused the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize nomination, instead suggesting it go to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar opposition leader in Burma who remained under house arrest for more than two decades. Kyi won the award, and Havel went to his grave having never told anyone about this—what a magnificent human being. So hey, if it was good enough for Havel, then I suppose it was good enough for me, right? Then again, I have notoriously low standards, and several Human Rights organizations don’t feel it’s “good enough” for anyone to live in, especially not the section I was in—the remand section.

  About half of the prisoners in Pankrác are serving time, while the other half are waiting to be sentenced (i.e., on remand, like myself). During the time of my detention in Pankrác, I was told there were approximately 1,400 prisoners in house. In 2006, the official capacity for the prison was 858 inmates. Somehow this was mysteriously increased to 1075 inmates by 2012—I say “mysteriously,” because from what I could see, there hadn’t been anything new added to the prison in decades. In fact, what was there was literally falling to pieces. The years of harsh Czech winters have not been kind to Pankrác, and the place is crumbling like a stale cookie in spots—I saw abandoned sections with broken glass windows that reminded me of downtown Detroit. In startling contrast, if you go to the Pankrác website, everything looks sort of old, but very well kept. There are photos of cells with freshly painted bars in their windows, a patch of green grass running alongside a spanking new razor-wire topped chain link fence, a polished wooden floor gymnasium with inmates playing some sort of indoor hockey, a freakin’ computer lab with attentive prisoners gathered around brand new flat screen monitors, deeply engrossed in what can only be an educational attempt to better themselves, so that once they waltz out of Pankrác they can all go work for IT companies or whatever—I actually burst out laughing when my wife gave me the link to this site after I was released.

  The interior of Pankrác looks absolutely nothing at all like those pictures. Perhaps things are somehow magically nicer and more modern in the area where inmates are serving out their sentences, but it’s very doubtful—after all, in 2011, just months before I arrived in Pankrác, prison officials got wind of a five prison coordinated riot in protest of poor living conditions being planned in the Czech Republic. A large cache of hundreds of shanks and homemade slashing weapons was found in Pankrác alone. While I’m certainly glad it didn’t kick off while I was incarcerated, I can understand the prisoners’ frustration. The place is well over a century old, and its age is very apparent once you’re deep behind its walls. In Washington, DC, lobbyists for the thriving prison-industrial complex would have a field day with the unsalvageable conditions of the entire facility; in fact, if Pankrác were in America, they would bulldoze that place quicker than you could say “biohazard lawsuit.” All it would take would be one 60 Minutes–style exposé focused solely on the levels of toxic mold in the cells, and Wal-Mart would be laying the foundation of their newest superstore before the dust from the wrecking ball had a chance to settle, while fifty miles away, BigHouseBuilders, Inc. would be explaining to some small rural community how the construction of a gargantuan new hoosegow, while slightly altering (i.e., destroying) the natural beauty of their hick burg, was going to super-charge their economy.

  Again, I can’t say for certain how the “other half” lives, but I damn sure know how prisoners on remand live. Unless you were lucky enough to have someone living nearby in Prague who would come to Pankrác, pick up your dirty laundry, and drop off clean clothes for you, you were not allowed to keep your own clothing and had to make due with whatever the prison decided to provide you with every two weeks or so. These “clothes” were often little more than rags; literally thread bare t-shirts riddled with rips and holes, and oddly sewn pants that arrived ripped, re-sewn with odd bits of homemade thread, and tied together in places with scraps of bed sheets in order to fit whomever they had been issued to previously (I had to do a ghetto tailoring job on every pair of pants I was issued in order for them to stay around my rapidly shrinking waist line). Gathered together daily in our prison gear in the yard for our one hour of fresh air, the posse on my cell block resembled a small and highly undisciplined army of semi-homeless guys.

  Each one of the three different cells I was housed in during my stay was utterly filthy—even if prisoners were given adequate cleaning supplies to scrub and tidy up their cells, which we weren’t (we were given a dirty bucket of hot water once a week—that’s it. No mop, no bleach, no detergent—we used a scrap of old rag carpet to scrub the floor with), the cell walls were crumbling, the paint was peeling, the plumbing was leaking, the mortar around door frames and cell windows was disintegrating. It was incontestable that nothing had been done to improve the conditions of these cells in years. Dust, dirt, and mildew were more than abundant, as well as various roaches and silverfish, scores of which I would terminate with extreme prejudice. There was also no ventilation in any of the cells, aside from one small window, which provided almost no air flow because our cell doors were kept locked for twenty-three hours a day. As we were only allowed two five-minute showers per week (thank God
at least there was hot water in the foul-smelling, grimy shower cell), things in the unventilated cell could get a little . . . tart, as one might imagine.

  Regular prisoners, according to the Pankrác website, can avail themselves of all sorts of amenities and activities in order to reduce the tension that comes with being incarcerated. I wouldn’t know, because I was on remand, along with half the prison. Unless I had a visit from my lawyer or had to see a doctor, I spent twenty-three solid hours a day locked in a dirty cell. The website also states that the average length of a remand prisoner’s stay is 100 days, but I met plenty of men who had been waiting to face their charges at trial for much longer than that. The only other native English-speaking prisoner I met, an Irishman I became acquainted with near the end of my stay, told me he had already been in Pankrác on remand for over six months at that point. He hadn’t even been charged yet. Apparently, the prosecuting attorney couldn’t make up his mind on whether to stick my newfound friend from the Emerald Isles with tax evasion or embezzlement. Furthermore, on the website it states that prisoners are separated according to the type of crime they are charged with, violent versus nonviolent offenders. This is also pure hogwash—I was being charged with a violent crime, as were other men I knew who faced even more serious charges, yet I talked to inmates who were charged with possession of drugs, shoplifting, driving while intoxicated, and in the case of my Irish friend, some sort of purely monetary offense. All of us—manslaughterers, drunk drivers, deadly assaulters, rapists, junkies, tax evaders and shoplifters—were in the yard together everyday, one big happy family.