Vojna Camp in the Light of Former Prisoners' Memories

In an effort to provide the public with a concrete, fact-based picture of our past during the communist dictatorship, the Vyšehrad publishing house, in cooperation with researchers from the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, began publishing a series of books dealing with individual events and processes of this difficult period in our history. The authors of these works draw on both archival research and the memories of witnesses from those years. One of the most significant areas in which then-Czechoslovakia participated in the preparation for another world conflict was the uranium industry. A number of mining enterprises were scattered throughout Bohemia, where uranium ore was mined for the production of atomic bombs. Since, for a number of reasons, protection against harmful radiation was neglected, the regime used prisoners, very often victims of the political trials of the time, to mine and process the ore. In his work, the young historian F. Bártík has captured the conditions prevailing in one of the most notorious labour camps – the Vojna camp in the Příbram region during the 1950s. Based on the testimony of prisoners, he describes both the working conditions in the mine and the daily routine of the inmates, depicting the most terrifying place in the entire facility – the so-called Bunker. He thus provides a stunning testimony about that era and the fates of the people within it, a testimony intended primarily for young people as a warning against the repetition of anything similar.