Contact men could go through the bars

In 1972 Ivan Binar started to serve his sentence in Bory prison. He was sentenced for some of his artistic activities that endangered socialistic regime allegedly. Political prisoners along with Binar were placed to cells together with common criminal convicts. The reason was to prevent political prisoners from any mutual contact. At that time also Petr Uhl, a reform activist back from 1968, served his sentence. Uhl was systematically breaking the isolation. „On Sundays we could freely move all across the facility,“ Ivan Binar remembers. „And some guy who was also political and sentenced according to the catch I. against the republic, took me to Petr.“ So that is how they met. According to Binar Petr Uhl was a very good organiser and for he had been in prison for three years already, he had enough time to establish a contact network connecting all political prisoners. What was its purpose? „Of course we were not trying to blow up the jail altogether with a kind of sherbet bomb, but we just wanted to stay in touch,“ claims Ivan Binar. „The jail is pretty big, there are eight buildings and Petr´s connections could as if walk through the bars.“ This way Ivan Binar could meet the representative of revival process, the general Prchlík. With his theatre colleague Schiffauer he even wrote a new musical for children called ´Bird, give us back the water goblin´ (Vrať nám, ptáku, hastrmana).