Václav Petr

“During the war we moved to Srbsko, where we had a brick cottage. It had both a cellar and a first floor, a small cottage it was, ten by ten meters. Next door there was this super villa. A German organisation arrived, and the Germans took over Srbsko near Beroun. I guess they wanted to mine resources - there are two quarries there. A part of the garrison stayed with the commanders, who took up residence in one stately house - it’s by the boom gate when you go through Srbsko down from the direction of Tetín. Based on the stripes on their shoulders, you could see that those who had more stripes lodged in the villa, and the cottages were occupied by those who had less of them. We lived in the cellar, they lived above us. The interesting thing is that, while everything the Germans did was bad, the ones who lived [above us] those two, three years, they had children, they were quite normal people. If someone’d whistle, they’d have taken a gun and gone to shoot us, but otherwise they didn’t behave like they were the rulers of Europe. So it worked out, our stay there.”

“When I came there it was a modern power plant. But it was bad news for the nearby inhabitants whenever we received a supply of coal and lit the boilers. You couldn’t see anything. There’s a hill there, Farkáň, it’s visible from the road. The houses on it weren’t completely hidden from view by the smoke. On our way to work the women would shout at us from the windows that they couldn’t even air their rooms. We had to change our coal supplier, it really was a disgrace when the smoke blew right in the direction from the rails to Farkáň. The people there really had it hard back then.”