600
PARTISAN REVIEW
more than the freer world: true friendship , solidarity , the nobility of anony–
mous mutual help, the spontaneous formation of natural groups among
people who see they can trust each other. These assets are unknown to those
who are trying to govern us .
We are grieved by the conditions of Jiri Muller and the other political
prisoners . Cut off from our expressions of sympathy, they meet only with
hostility and insults and find support only in the strength of their own char–
acters. Our prisons are a logical end product of our system : its characteristics
extended to an absurd degree . Our whole system is based not on social justice
and socialism but on the efforts of our leaders to remain in power . Prison is
intended not to change the convictions of political offenders and reeducate
them , but
to
break them . Prison is an instrument of revenge on political
opponents . Whereas in civilian society our leaders try to disguise their inten–
tions in social demagogy, their attitude toward political opponents is openly
cynical.
Here one might expect to read a list of horrors and tortures as described
by Solzhenitsyn . We have nothing like that at our disposal . The antidemo–
cratic system of silence, concealment , atomization of society , absence of
communication between individual sections has achieved its end : prison for
political offenders is a world unto itselfabout which the rest of the population
has , and is allowed to have, no idea. The majority of the population does not
know how many scores, hundreds , or thousands of persons have been im–
prisoned for their convictions and in what conditions they and their families
are living .
Nevertheless, scattered pieces of information do penetrate the prison
walls. Compared with the Gulag of the Byzantine empire , the methods of
torturing people in our country are less primitive and ostentatious . One could
apply the Western term, mental cruelty . Our political prisoners are kept for
years in isolation , in a cell with one or, at the most , two fellow prisoners. They
are not allowed to contact anyone else even when taken to the yard for exer–
cise. Their only contact with the outside world is the four annual visits by
members of their family , who often cannot find money enough to make the
trip , and one four-page letter per week (to one family at one address).
It
is up
to
the " organ" to decide what a political prisoner may write and read in a
letter. He and his family are not allowed to write about philosophy , religion,
ethics, politics ; they may not insert pressed flowers , quote poetry , or even
mention the names of authors if they are Czech. A prisoner may keep only one
letter, the last.
All prisoners do hard work which is usually harmful to their health , but
the political prisoners do not even have a change of surroundings ; they work
in their cells , and their norms are particularly hard. In every way their condi-
