Ladislav Koza

“In Kladno, an engineering-school student shot a German soldier, the soldier’s name was Kniest. The Germans reacted by closing down all secondary school – the school of engineering, the business academy and the pedagogical institute. So I didn’t have anything to do and therefore I worked in the shaft. I remember that. Then I worked in the metal works. Later I commuted to Prague because my parents didn’t want me to do such heavy work. I was looking for a new job and I got into that company Baal movies.”

“The Russians came in their tank. We told them that there was a gun fight. I’ll never forget that. Bullets were flying in the air, I swear, bullets were flying everywhere around. That Russian, he climbed out of the tank and went to the entrance gate. They kicked the gate open. We were guarding the place but we were so freaked out we would shoot everything that moved. They just went inside, ignoring the fire… They didn’t care for their lives or they must have been totally drunk.”

“I was a lathe operator. They re-trained me as a lath operator and I was making torpedoes. The lathe was bigger than this whole room.” Interviewer: “How did the semi-finished product look like? Was it a cylinder?” “Yes, it was a regular cylinder, a pipe about three meters in diameter. We only processed the centre, the head and bottom was processed by someone else.” Interviewer: “So the pipe came and what did you do? What did you lathe?” “We just lathed the top and the centre. We lathed the outer coating and the inside of the pipe. We were just turning the pipe. Then we did the screw threads on both sides because the head and the bottom had to be screwed to the body. It was a good job because I just had to mount it and watch it and that was my shift.”

“When I ran away from the forced labor in Germany my father, who worked at the police in Kladno at the time, received a report about it three days later. They knew that I lived in Kladno so they informed the local police that they were supposed to watch out for me. Therefore I went voluntarily back, I returned. I got a few slaps from my superior for running away and I went back to work.”