How I Survived Jail with the Help of a Hungarian Salami

This chapter presents the author's real life jail experience. The author worked at the University of Vienna and conducted depth interviews. He got arrested without any knowledge of the reason. After a week though, he found out the real reason behind his arrest. Without his knowledge, the institute had been used during the Dollfuss & Schuschnigg Fascist rule of Austria as a secret mailing center from where information was sent to Brno, Czechoslovakia. A few of the students working in the Institute knew about these activities. Many of his colleagues from the institute were in jail. The Social Democratic Party leaders and all the union leaders had either fled months before or were in jail. Three or four days after his incarceration, he was awakened at 2 o’clock in the morning and brought before a senior police official for an interview. The salami and the jail sojourn of 4 weeks became the turning point in his life.