Kurt Schramek

"When we arrived in Brazil, Australia or Japan, we could walk off the ship straight into port without any trouble. However, when we arrived in China, they lined us up, and soldiers came, and we had to show them our passports. They looked us over, wrote us down, signed... Only then were we allowed to go ashore. But we couldn't go to the port at all. There was a bus waiting to take us to a fenced compound. It was completely different from everywhere else in the city. There were restaurants, bars, and game halls, where we could play ping-pong or go to the movies. But we weren't allowed outside. We weren't allowed out there. We had to be behind that fence, and then they took us back to the ship in the evening."

"Boats. I always talked about boats. I remember we were given these papers to write what we wanted to do when we left school. Locksmith? Or drive a tractor? Work in agriculture? I already knew that I wanted to go to sea. I thought I'd get on a Czech ship, because Czechoslovakia did have ships. They gave it back to me and said it was impossible. That I had to be a locksmith or an electrician or something. So I wrote locksmith. There were about twenty of us in the class. The recruiters came from Ostrava, and they only had fifteen spots. Locksmith, electrician and so on. The last five spots were for the shaft. So the poor people who didn't get a better job had to go to the shaft. That was the only thing they could do."