Found: a good "Monastery" for Soros--in Valdice, CZ

On August 14, 1988, the Observer reported that Valdice, a former Carthusian monastery which Czech President Havel has characterized as the "Czech Sing-Sing," housed 2800 prisoners, including political prisoners. Those who made beads were expected to produce 30-40 kg a day (Sweeny 1988:24). Prisoners manufactured beads and assembled imitation jewelry, necklaces, chandeliers and rosaries. The Observer article and a follow-up in the Autumn issue of East European Review revealed that although not all glassware was prison-made, the scale of the jail-factory operation was "not small," that prisoners were worked "ferociously hard," and that prisoners faced "violence from other inmates if tough production targets were not met" (ibid.). Charter 77 activists Peter Uhl and Jiri Gruntorad (1988:16) observed sarcastically that "graduates of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University may learn how to make settings for gemstones; then for several years they do monotonous work assembling imitation jewelry." [After the 'Velvet Revolution' in 1989, Peter Uhl served briefly as the General Director of the Czechoslovak News Agency, or CTK.]

The Czechoslovak penal system ... serves mainly as a source of cheap labor, especially for enterprises manufacturing glass jewelry...", Charter 77, 1987, Document #48

During the communist era in Czechoslovakia, the bead business had a dark side most jewelry importers are probably still unaware of. The Czechs had a tradition of being notoriously closed-mouthed about where and how their glass products were made. Most people assumed that this was to protect industrial secrets, but the real reason for this may be more complex and needs to be examined.

For hundreds of years, the center of the glass bead industry in Bohemia was a town called Gablonz. The Gablonz glass and metal costume jewelry business was mostly run by ethnic (Sudeten) Germans. The people of Gablonz exported attractively made, inexpensive costume jewelry throughout the world. Sample-men traveled the world to gather information on the styles of beads in vogue in places as remote as Tibet, Africa, and Japan. Gablonz craftsmen imitated traditional beads found around the world, and their imitations were even cheaper in foreign lands than locally made beads. The town was so successful that a Lloyd's steamship, christened "Gablonz," began transporting bangles from Trieste to Bombay in 1913. Nazi occupation brought an end to this successful era. Nazi 'experts' characterized the Gablonz production as a trinket industry and many factories were converted to military production (Jargstorf 1993: 4-15).**

In 1945-46, the Czech administration expelled the Sudeten Germans and the town was renamed Jablonec nad Nisou. Initially, the new communist government that took power in 1948 had no use for a costume jewelry industry. However, after Stalin's death, it was revived and a state monopoly was created, called 'Jablonex,' based in Jablonec nad Nisou, to export all costume jewelry and beads.

According to testimony by Joseph Frolik (1975) in the U.S. Senate, Jablonex and several other foreign trade enterprises provided commercial cover for agents and officers of the communist intelligence services. [Frolik was a veteran of 17 years in the Soviet-controlled Czech intelligence service who defected after the 1968 Prague Spring.] These foreign trade companies operated all over the world and combined their legitimate activities with the illicit transfer of embargoed military technology to the communist bloc.

After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, Slavomir Stracar, the Czech Minister of Foreign Trade, promised to purge intelligence officers from his ministry and from several foreign trade enterprises that did double-duty as trading companies and outposts for State Security. However, Stracar died suddenly at the age of 55 during an official visit to Brazil. Some newspapers, such as Lidove Noviny (Sept. 10, 1990), hinted at the possibility of foul play, and the former Charter 77 activist, Stanislav Devaty , called for an investigation into Stracar's death (Oberman 1990: 17). [Devaty is presently the head of his country's counter-espionage agency, the Security and Information Service, or BIS.]

In 1979, the internationally recognized bead expert and museum consultant, Peter Francis Jr., published a monograph (Francis 1979) on the history of beadmaking in Czechoslovakia and Jablonec. This material was interesting and informative except for the fact that the author was evidently unaware of, or deemed irrelevant, the disturbing allegations about Jablonex's collaboration with the communist intelligence apparatus. The author did, however, include a colorful tale about two 18th-century Bohemian glassmakers who tried (and failed) to steal the secrets of glassmaking from Murano, the glassmaking island in the lagoon of Venice (ibid. 19). In this book, Francis commented: "Ironically, no glass beads are today being produced in the town of Jablonec itself. The glass factories there concentrate on imitation diamonds, and glass beads are made elsewhere in the district" (my emphasis), (ibid. 14). One would think that the chronicler of the Czech bead story, who was accustomed to sift through prehistoric archaeological evidence and had tracked Bohemian bead-spies through Venetian lagoons, might have turned over a few rocks in his quest to uncover clues about the sources of Czech beads during the 1970s.

In 1988, a London bead store owner, Stefany Tomalin, learned that one factory was located in Valdice Prison. Tomalin told The London Observer that a former Czech political prisoner, Jaroslav Javorsky, had visited her shop and recognized the beads he made in Valdice Prison, near Jablonec. Javorsky said that "one man was expected to produce around ten thousand beads per day." Tomalin (1988: 18) subsequently included her account of this visit in her popular book Beads!

The prisoners had no doubts that the beads, jewelry and chandeliers were made for export. Jiri Gruntorad, sentenced for publishing subversive literature, told the Observer, "They told us to make it of the highest quality and on many of the necklaces the price tags were written in dollars" (Sweeny 1988: 24).The foreign trade company, Jablonex, would have been the exclusive exporter of all of this prison jewelry. A defensive rebuttal in the October 15, 1988 issue of Rude Pravo admitted that some prisoners were "dissidents" who "live in locked bedrooms and do not work outside the institution" (Krtica 1988: 1, 8-9). In fact, prisoners were not "locked in their bedrooms" like wayward teenagers, but packed like sardines into the monastic cells once reserved for monks of the contemplative Carthusian order.

In 1990, Janet Coles and Robert Budwig (1990:14) suggested that beads were manufactured, albeit slowly, in Jablonec factories: "Today in Jablonec, the bead center of Czechoslovakia, the export of beads is severely rationed, despite high demand, because in a typical factory there are only 80 skilled workers capable of producing 240 pieces every day." Although Valdice reportedly remains a prison, this testimony about a bead shortage strongly suggests that the inventory produced by the prison system declined or ceased altogether in late 1989 when both ordinary and political prisoners were released. Also interesting is Cole's and Budwig's assertion that the "typical factory" in Jablonec has 80 workers. Actually, the "typical factory" in a communist country was extremely large and produced most, if not all, of a particular product in that country. The operation at Valdice would be "most typical" of a communist factory. Even if Jablonec did have bead factories, typical or otherwise, the town would have needed a lot of factories to overtake the production and assembly schedule of the 2800 men at Valdice in 1988.

In 1991, Peter Francis (1991) summarized the Observer article in his newsletter under the heading "Beads Made in Czech Prison?" and observed that it "shook many in the bead world." He then cited an anonymous American importer of Czech beads and an anonymous but "well-placed" Czech to the effect that a "rather tiny percentage" of the total number of glass beads were made by prison labor and that "only one prison in the region is involved" (ibid. 9). Both sources claimed that Jablonex was "not (officially) aware of the practice, and does not knowingly export beads from this source. The beads are slipped into lots coming from other producers, and thus entered the market surreptitiously ." Francis concluded, Where does the truth of all this lie? The new openness of Czech society should furnish us an answer in the near future" (ibid.).

In fact, the truth about the use of convict labor in the jewelry industry had emerged prior to the new openness and contradicts the testimony of Francis's confidential sources, who seem bent on minimizing both the extent of forced labor in the jewelry industry and the embarrassing revelations about the export company, Jablonex. Francis's anonymous sources might be discredited, but would probably not be endangered, by exposure. At least as early as March 1, 1976, a publicly disseminated appeal signed by relatives and addressed to the authorities on behalf of political prisoners noted that the prisoners make glass pearls and artificial flowers, articles that Jablonex exports (Muller 1979: 40). This information was available, in English, by 1979, in Muller's Since the Prague Spring, and more on-the-record testimony followed.

In 1983, a recently released prisoner reported that the dissident Czech Jesuit, Fr. Frantisek Lizna, was assigned to work cutting glass for the Preciosa Jewelry Company in the prison at Plzen-Bory (Keston College 1973: 5). In 1987, a 160-page document on Czechoslovakian prisons, compiled by the human rights organization Charter 77 and signed by its leadership, stated unequivocally that "the Czechoslovak penal system serves mainly as a source of cheap labor, especially for enterprises manufacturing glass jewelry" and that those who derive a financial benefit from the prisoners' forced labor are a danger to the moral fabric of society, "because the public must not be told what is going on behind prison walls and consequently cannot control what happens ostensibly in its name" (Radio Free Europe Sept. 11, 1987 p. 33). This Charter 77 Document #48 was used as a primary source for the 1989 Helsinki Watch report, Prison Conditions in Czechoslovakia. Portions of Document #48 are translated in the appendix of that report. One section of the document was contributed and signed by Vaclav Havel, who is now the President of the Czech Republic. The Charter 77 Document #48, which was published in 1990 in full and in Czech by Uhl and Gruntorad, should have been studied and publicized by U.S. Customs and by independent experts, such as Francis, on the history of the glass bead and jewelry industry in Czechoslovakia.

After the 1989 revolution and in response to the initial Helsinki Report, the Czech and Slovak governments invited Helsinki Watch to inspect prisons during July, 1990. This report concluded that "although many problems remain ... most of the worst evils are gone...[and] prison administrators ... seem genuinely committed to creating and maintaining a humane prison system" (Helsinki Watch, 1991, iv).

The grim conditions in Valdice were also addressed by two American physicians in an October 15, 1988 letter to The New York Times (Lawrence and Kirschner 1988: 31). They visited the political prisoner, Jiri Wolf, in Valdice. Wolf was first arrested in 1978 for participating in a dissident group, "The Committee Against the Dictatorship." After his release, Wolf began to work with Charter 77 and founded a journal on prison conditions, trade unionism, and human rights. He was re-arrested and sentenced to six more years in Valdice (ibid.). Wolf described the now-closed Minkovice Prison and its glassworks in Document #48, and a translation appears in the 1989 Helsinki Report. In his autobiography, Wolf writes that during his imprisonment in Minkovice Prison (April 1980-January 1981) he "cut and polished small pieces for chandeliers" in a glass factory inside the prison. If his group did not meet their quota, they were beaten by a 'boss prisoner' (Wolf and Rawlings 1994: 53). When he was transferred to Valdice Prison in January, 1981, Wolf operated the presses and drills to make Christmas ornaments. Then he as "shifted to a section which fashioned over 200 types of glass and plastic jewelry. Almost all of these items were exported to America and Western Europe" (ibid. 81). For three years Wolf made glass necklaces; his quota was 48 necklaces a day.

According to Petr Cibulka, at Plzen Bory, "management were stealing products from each shift" so that one time "production fell literally overnight by 20 percent!" (Helsinki Watch 1989: 63). In any case, Cole and Budwig report that bead exports were severely rationed in 1990, so it seems that only a few beads were exported at this time, although it is probable that the bead shortage can be explained more by the massive release of prisoners that followed the 1989 'Velvet Revolution' than by the high demand for Czech beads. Whatever the explanation, it is probable, based on what Charter 77 uncovered, that glass and jewelry products were routinely, if not exclusively, made in prison factories.

Strangely, despite the evidence, the U.S. Customs Service never banned Jablonex products in the U.S., although American law forbids the import or sale of items manufactured in foreign prisons. Rather, Jablonex officials maintained an office in New York City and cultivated contacts with bead experts in the U.S. Hopefully, responsible Czech business people, government officials or reporters will provide a fuller account about the activities of Jablonex in the near future. Perhaps the Museum of Glass and Costume Jewelry in Jablonec could devote a section in its building to documenting the truth about the 'Czech bead story.'

(see the link for the footnotes)

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