Miroslav Kočica

“I watch the documentaries from the war which are broadcast on television every Monday. I liken the Minkovice prison to concentration camps in Poland and Germany, it was the same as Minkovice. The communists adopted it precisely from Germans, it is absolutely the same, as if copied over a stencil. The only difference was that they cremated the Jews in Auschwitz, and this was not happening in Minkovice, but on the other hand they were using us for work. That was because Russia was a huge country and the costume jewellery that was produced here was all exported to Russia and to those developing countries. They needed us, and that’s why there were no old people; all prisoners there were young people, otherwise they would not be able to keep up with the pace of the work.”

“It was a slave work, you cannot imagine that if you did not see it. We were cutting glass. It was the costume jewellery from Jablonec, the beads, and it was being sent somewhere to Russia. The prisoners there were less than thirty years old, because older people would not be able to endure the work load, the work norms. We toiled and toiled and toiled there. Nobody can imagine the work norms. This company, Preciosa, had a subsidiary in Šahy in Slovakia, and their civilian workers were coming there for some inspections, and one of them told us that with the norms you have here you would earn four thousand crowns if you worked in our factory. That was a lot of money. Workers working in that company were required to work only half of that norm, whereas here, they wanted to destroy you both physically and mentally.”