Miroslav Vaněk

"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!'"

"In 1970, 21st of August they came on us. And these were soldiers because an officer was in charge. As the buses came with a morning shift - morning shift consist from at least two thousand and hald people - they prepared cordons by each of those buses and whoever got off - whether it was a director, secretary, miner, cook, locksmith or cleaner - everybody got slamed with baton. So we finaly remembered that these brothers are here to protect us. Morning shift got some, afternoon got some, night shift got some. Afternoon shift got twice. They were waiting for them by the prefab houses and as the workers got off the buses and always four or five of them went into the same door. Then they told them: 'Disband! This is sedition! Maximum two person for an entrance!' And one of the foremen told them: 'Guys, stop fooling around, we all live here!' As soon as he finished he got bashed with batons. Everyone got bruises on their backs. In the morning after, everybody went to doctor and call themseves sick."

“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.”

“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.”