Ján Paulíny

“I sat on a pile of coal and one of the miners came to me and said, ‘What are you here for? What have you done?’ I answered, ‘I don’t even know. I was studying at the university and they called me up.’ He was staring at me for a while and then he said, ‘Come on, you don’t have to babble, we know that you are here for murder, peculation, sexual assaults and delicts of such kind. So which one of those have you committed?’ I said, ‘Well, I really just studied. Nothing else.’ ‘Then keep it for yourself.’ He didn’t believe me and added, ‘We know you all are here such a group. But as far as you are working and not halting our work, we have nothing against you.’”

“We worked in assisting production and the rubber conveyor belts broke. The belts were 80 centimeters wide and sometimes even 50 meters long. When they broke, it was necessary to reconnect them. Of course, there the miners were called. The broken parts of the belts were trimmed away; such clips were installed on the belts, so that such metal pin could be put through and hold them together. There was a seam of about 120 – 130 centimeters high. The first two weeks we worked on our knees, on such felt pads, what was really painful. Then we had to learn how to work in forward bend. And just at that time, one of the belts tore and was needed to be fixed. One side of the belt was secured by a corbel, a hole in the ground and on the opposite side was done to make it lean firmly against each other. The second part of the belt was chained to a gripper machine. It was about 10 – 12 kilogram thing, such a hoist working on lever basis. One side was firmly fixed and we were pulling the other part. We were sitting, since it was impossible to work otherwise, our heads tilted and we were switching at that lever on the gripper. However, unluckily, when it was my turn, we exerted such power, that the wooden corbel broke and the belt retrogressed jolting the hoist so strongly that it passed right by my ear and just made a draft. There was also the section manager present and three of my friends. The one named Steiner told me, ‘Janek, you were born for the second time!’ If the 10 – 12-kilo gripper went just 5 centimeters closer – one wouldn’t be able to survive that.”