Miroslav Vaněk

“There was this rock as big as this and this together. He was having a hard time breaking it with a pneumatic drill. He stayed at it, trying to break it for about an hour but it was in vain. His name was Vašek Vytlačilů. He had a wife and a kid back at home. So Jirka wanted to help him. He told him he would break it for him. The mining machine had already gone down and the foreman came and said: ‘goddamn it, what are you doing here guys? Why does it take you so long? You better hurry up boys’. Jirka got furious and forced the drill in an effort to finally break that rock. But the drill slid, Jirka fell on the ground and was instantly buried under a huge boulder that had just come loose of the rock at that moment. He was crushed from head to toe. Only his feet were sticking out from under that rock. Three guys were ordered to break that stone in order to get him out of there. They drilled it until quarter past eight. They even called a demolition guy to blast that rock. They finally got him out and carried his crushed body on a stretcher bellow the shaft. The doctor came to examine the body. This doctor was a swine. His name was Ivan Nimra. Nobody liked him. The waiting room in his office was smashed from all his unhappy patients. He was a brute. He would send guys with a severe flu to work with the drill. He said that was the perfect cure for them. When he came down to the shaft he said: ‘where’s that stupid corpse that made me have to come down here on a Saturday at quarter past eight?’. The guys the body of Jirka on a stretcher and cried because he had been a good friend of them. This guy just callously pushed his body from the stretcher on the ground. If the foreman hadn’t been there at that moment, they would have beaten him to death for doing that. The foreman and his assistant had a hard time pushing the guys away from the doctor to make sure he wouldn’t land on that stretcher, too.”

"It was in 50s and they were confiscating goods from their shop. So they wouldn't be able to sell and would have to go bankrupt. They just came in the night with their sedan car, three men jumped out and hammered on the door: 'Open up! Open up! Where are your goods?' They were taking away flour, sugar, margarine, ... simply everything what there was. Once I watched them and back there where the sedan stood, he got a reserve wheel. They took it off, opened the trunk and they put everything in that trunk. And they said that they are going to hand it over to national committee. But they of course kept it all for themselves. Nobody handed over a single thing. That's how they did it."

"Fourteen or ten days after, just as the smoke stoped coming out of ther' , the rescuers went down the shaft. Each got a bottle of rum, because the people down there were their friends. And they found all of them burned to death behind those build-in doors." (Pause) "And then Zdeněk Vrána - they came for him to that woodyard where we worked during holidays. Foreman came and also civilians and they said:'You're going to wash these coffins.' Because they had to take each of the dead bodies separately so they could tell which body belong's to who. They lay there in the way that they were burned heavily on the top but on the other side as they'd lain facing the ground their bodies were not completely burnt. And it smelled like hell. So then the boys washed those coffins and the STB officers were telling them:'Don't even think about telling somewhere what you've seen here!'"

“One year later we went again on a strike, demanding the Russians to leave. They massacred us in Havířov at the National Avenue near the post office building. The police sprinkled us with water. They had their cars covered with metal sheets from top to bottom to make sure no one could set them on fire. A lady leaned out of her window on the second floor and threw a dish with potatoes at them. In an instant, she was sprinkled with water shattering the window glass and ruining her apartment. We would always scatter and move some 200 meters away. They came and sprinkled us again so we had to run again.”

“When they would confiscate their shop, the wooden roller shutters were covered with scribblings like ‘death to the bourgeois, death to the imperialists, death to traitors’. There was crap rolled into newspapers and placed on the door handle or the bell. They would pour crap over them. Every time somebody rang the bell, my grandfather would… he had these grapes underneath his windows. So they were afraid even to open the door. So they turned off the light, opened the window and someone would cover them with crap. It was crap from a cesspit. It was the local comrades, the militiamen and the like. That crap would sometimes contain used sanitary napkins. Being a six-year old, I would ask my grandfather if these were bandages. He would tell they were indeed bandages.”

“They attacked us on Tuesday. They surrounded the shaft with their tanks. Four Russian tanks were given the task to blow up the mine tower. The director of the mine, engineer Rubeš (Ing. Alfons Petráš, note by the author), was a good director. He would come down to the shaft to inspect the night shifters. He told one of the miners, who had three kids, to relax a bit and he would drill for an hour in his place. Or he would come to another miner, have some tee with him and help him out as well. He would keep saying: ‘I’m a man, I’m young, so I’ll help you with the tough job’. It was this very guy who was later put in jail for 3,5 years. He said ‘let’s go on strike’ and we went on strike. We were three days on strike when the Russian tanks arrived. He took his deputy and they went to negotiate with the Russians. They took a white flag with them to make sure the Russians would not shoot them to pieces. They would be perfectly capable of doing something like that. The director said: ‘not even a ton for the occupiers until all the boys have come back from the shaft. There’s a thousand night shifters down in the mine. If you start shooting here, they’ll never see the sun again. You’ll have to shoot me first’. He also called out to all miners from the area to come to our support to Havířov. They would hop on busses and when they arrived, they cordoned off the shaft with their bodies, thus preventing the Russians from opening fire on the shaft. Guys from the rabbit cages in Havířov joined us in our strike and we would strike for three days. The work in the mine came to a standstill.”