Photographs of Drawings

During the era of communist Czechoslovakia, the month of May was linked with an amnesty several times. It was usually announced on the occasion of Czechoslovakia’s liberation (1955, 1957, 1960, 1962, 1965), but the preamble may have also stated other reasons: in May 1953, for instance, it was the death of President Klement Gottwald in March, although the Czechoslovak officials only dared to launch it after Beria’s amnesty in the Soviet Union in March 1953. The amnesty not always included political prisoners. In 1955, for instance, the convicts of high treason (under Sect. 78 of the Penal Code), sabotage (Sect. 84 and 85) and espionage (Sect. 86 and 87) and similar acts under previous laws, i.e. the crimes that usually applied in the sentences of political prisoners, were excluded from amnesty.

Especially in the 1950s the life in the penitentiary facilities in totalitarian Czechoslovakia was very cruel, marked with hunger, poor medical care, bad sanitary conditions, exhausting physical work and strict discipline. Also the number of prisoners which exceeded the capacity of the prisons, and living in contact with people of different social origin, age and education, as well as reasons for imprisonment, were a source of permanent frustration.

Photographs of drawings depicting the life in prison life have been chosen for this archival of the month. The author and origin of these drawings remain unknown. The inscriptions “24 December 1955” and “Ilava” in one of them could imply that the author was probably an inmate in this facility for political prisoners in Slovakia (in 1955 Ilava was a prison for males). However, no archival materials have as yet helped to unveil his identity.

More information is available regarding the manner in which the State Police officers took the photographs of these drawings. At the end of 1964 and in July 1965, Wallace Felt Toronto visited Czechoslovakia. As an American, he was the leader of the Czechoslovak branch of the Church of Mormon from 1936. He head to escape from the Nazis and later, after the war, also from the communists. Nevertheless, he still tried to gain official approval from the Czechoslovak authorities for the activity of the Church, and maintained correspondence with its members. At the turn of 1964/1965, he was able to get an entry visa and go to Karlovy Vary, Pilsen and Prague. He booked a room in the hotel Continental in Pilsen on 8 January 1965, and when he and his wife left to visit fellow believers, the State Police in Pilsen made a secret search of the room, during which they discovered and photographed also the drawings from the prison. How Wallace F. Toronto had gotten them remains a mystery. Someone must have given them to him here, but no details are available.

To make the story complete, we should mention that Wallace F. Toronto was expelled from Czechoslovakia during his second visit to the country in July 1965.