Vojna's shocking labour-camp museum

South of Příbram is Vojna, one of those chilling museums that remind you of 20th-century Europe's dark side. Uranium was mined on this site in the years following World War II by forced labour under the Soviets, and the museum here evokes those terrible times.

The labour camp here looks like a concentration camp, but was nothing to do with the Holocaust. It was, however, everything to do with some regimes' astounding capacity for cruelty. You go inside the concrete box where miscreants were punished, locked in an airless, pitch dark, empty space for days at a time, with up to thirty others crammed in the room. The ceiling was deliberately just too low to stand up fully, and there was nothing to sit or sleep on.

You also see the barbed wire fences, the lookout towers, the prison cells, the barracks, the 'culture rooms' where 'relaxation' consisted of watching propaganda films.

German prisoners of war were the first inmates just after 1945. Soon after, Vojna became home to enemies of the Communist state - criminals, some, but many simply clergy, academics, writers, or other peaceful everyday people who had simply said the wrong thing or associated with the wrong person.

Getting here is easy. It's a pleasant 8km bike ride from Příbram along the city's green corridor and through woods on decent forest tracks. But, unlike for Vojna's luckless inhabitants, it's also easy to leave, and freewheel back to the town for a drink to celebrate this fragile state of peace we currently enjoy.