Sisel, Václav

http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n62313

Václav Sisel was a Czech printer. In the 1950s, Sisel was employed as a technical chief in the Pankrác Prison print shop. It was there, in 1953, that he met convicted writers Josef Knap, František Křelina, and Jan Zahradníček. According to Zdeněk Kalista, Czech historian, poet, and former prisoner, Václav Sisel was “very decent and significantly different from the other guards at Pankrác Prison”. Sisel concealed Jan Zahradníčekʼs poetry manuscripts, written illegally in the print shop. In 1955, when Sisel was dismissed from the print shop, he smuggled Zahradníčekʼs poems out and buried them, first in his fatherʼs garden and later in the garden of his own cottage. Sisel dug them out in March 1968 and gave them to František Křelina and Josef Knap.

Location

Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
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Birth place

Benešov, Czech Republic

Birth date

1919

Date of death

1984

Owner of

Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature

Collector at

Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature

References

Zahradníček, Jan. 2015. Dům Strach. Praha: Vyšehrad.

Kalista, Zdeněk. 1988. Vzpomínání na Jana Zahradníčka. München: Obrys/Kontur, Opus bonum.

Doležal, Miloš. 2016. “Jak čestný a citlivý dozorce zachránil literární poklad.” Last modified July 20. http://www.rozhlas.cz/plus/dokument/_zprava/jak-cestny-a-citlivy-dozorce-zachranil-literarni-poklad--1634490.

Last edited on: 2019-02-01 22:44:03