Ladislav Vavřík

“'What have you been doing there, guys? I thought I´we lost my mind,' a combine operator would ask us in a pub. As we would erect those fake trees. There were these poles we would erect and fasten them with ropes. It looked like two umbrellas pointed against each other. And by doing that, we could make a tree covered with snow or with leaves on. We would do that to confuse the enemy in case of a air-raid. Because afterwards we would fire a missile the estimated survival time of our unit would be around three and half minutes. The enemy plane would answer our fire with another missile and we would be annihilated. So our estimated survival time had been set to three and half minutes.”

¨I was at the signal box and I saw that on the marshalling yard there was this group of men staring at a control panel. Either someone would throw the switch in a wrong direction or there was a malfunction as there were two trains going against each other. And one of them was carrying these so-called 'Veronikas' (Torpedo cars) which were huge cigar shaped tanks for transporting molten iron. And suddenly, there was this hellish creaking. As 'Veronikas' would flip over and the iron would pour on the railway. Molted iron would soak into the ground as they would find when they were trying to dispose it. That was quite a big deal as even the metal production in Vítkovice had to stop because of that. But fortunately there were no consequences as they wouldn´t lock anyone up or so. In the end, the army had been trying to blow that mass up so it could be taken apart. But the railway would just jump up a bit and the shock-wave would break all the windows around. Iron would pour even into the cable wells. It destroyed just everything, so in the end, we had to build a new yard.”

“The Beseda House´s café and restaurant used to be almost in our backyard, and various official events would take place there. On one occasion, marshal Malinovsky came and he was surrounded by these kids with bandannas. But as he would pass another crowd of children without them, he would chose me and and tie one around my neck. And these children of communist officials would be so upset that they would complain at home. That´s how we have been living back then. After school, the more important things were happening in the backyard, all the games we used to play there. And often there would be this horse cart coming to the café to bring out the sewage. The whole backyard was uneven and full of puddles. There was this considerable deal of wretchedness in it.”