The Undefeated [antikvár]

WE lived at that time in sort of catacombs like the early Christians and talked about salvation. Our physical survival seemed quite hopeless. We were prisoners of an evil system, bent on our destruction. But some of us in the prison cellar and in similar catacombs all over the country were in fact doubly imprisoned; our minds were in chains. That obsession which had helped to build up the evil system still held some of us in its grip, keeping its microscopic jailers on the upper shelves of our brains. The obsession—a curious sort of controlled schizophrenia—made the life of its victims difficult even under "normal circumstances"; it turned jail-existence into an unbearable nightmare. And then some of us were saved. Our minds were liberated by the relentless shock-treatment of twentieth-century history. My salvation came in 1951, when I had already spent two years in jail. I was feverish for days. I went through a crisis very near to a nervous breakdown. Then I recovered slowly and started to enjoy my return to the normal world of common sense and common decency. We still sat in the very same catacombs, we were still emaciated convicts, the lowest of the low. No old and sick beggar in his senses would have changed places with us, but we—the freshly saved ones—were intensely happy. After years or even decades of mental strait-jackets it was wonderful to be free within our skulls. We watched shyly and humbly the re-emergence of our consciences, the restoration of freedom within us. My cell-mates of that period were not all pessimists. There was a grey-haired man who believed that in ten or fifteen years we might be released. Knowing the story of my life, he