Jaroslav Matějů

“I was assigned to [forced labour] at Ruzyně Airport. I lived in Vinohrady, by the brewery, and I took the morning tram to the end of the tram line, which was the end of the tram line as it is now. We didn’t have the means for the buses, or they had cancelled them in those days because it was dangerous, and either there were people there who worked there, who were directly assigned there and who lived in the surrounding villages, or as in my case, I had to commute almost an hour and a half every morning, to allow time for the tram to get from Vinohrady to the end of line eleven; well, and from there we set off on foot; and when there, they would yell at us and we’d dig trenches or things like that, and usually there’d be an alarm at midday, that was the end of it, so there’d be a surveillance plane, a Western one, stuck high up above the airport. But when there was just one, they ignored it, but sometimes there were more of them, and they’d come all over the grounds there, whatever aeroplanes happened to be there, they’d shoot them up, right... We built those air-raid shelters for aeroplanes, we had a digger at our disposal because it was a big construction project; you cut a chunk out of the ground, and the aeroplane drove in, backwards; it had camouflage on top...”

“And we had a Red Cross station not far from Libočák because there were a lot of wounded and injured people there, so there were some doctors there, so we took a pub close to the water tower, and we made it into a Red Cross station - and that was just a short way from the Vinohrady hospital, so there was shooting there as well. There was an ambulance car of some kind that we pulled out from a barricade, and because there were some boys there who knew how to do that kind of thing, they pieced it together, and there we had ourselves an ambulance, really, and that’s what we drove around in. Except, don’t forget that we were just boys, so we couldn’t do anything much... we could only add something, or we had to be at the ready, or pass on some message. [Q: So the car really was used to transport the wounded?] Yes! We didn’t just transport the wounded, but later on we also transported material, which was from those army trains... and there were these big garages a bit further on past Flora, Samír Garages - so we took those and when we found some material somewhere, we moved it there, right...”