Vladimír Vlk

"The dispatcher controlled the rolling mills and where to pour the hot ingot from the 150+ kg vat. And when he needed to roll something, he moved it between the different rolling mills depending on which one was free. For operations, they only needed people to supervise the progress or to make minor repairs to, for example, the wipers that wiped off the residual material so it wouldn't get tangled on the wire. Then there was a fatality. The dispatcher knew the repairman was working on the rolling mill, yet he let production in and sixty meters of wire went through the guy."

"The roller grabbed the wire in a pair of pliers and guided it to the last rolling bench, where it ran to the cooling grate or the wire was wound onto the wheel. You had to learn that transfer. It was the sleight of hand. We were taught it by the old boys. He'd grab it with a pair of pliers and we'd watch. Or he'd catch it with a glove. But they knew what they could do. We'd look at it with our eyes wide open. Or maybe he caught it, let go two feet, twirled the hot wire like a lasso, and caught it at the end so he could introduce it. We'd watch what old rollers who'd been working there for maybe ten or twenty years could do."

"We were working with Poles at work, talking with them about something against the Communist Party, and we were threatened with being fired from our jobs. There were others. When we were showering together, there was one who was carrying hot metal, he had a tattoo of the letter B. I don't know if he was an SS man or otherwise a marked German. And he was there. But a lieutenant who had served in the Western Army in the RAF, they rounded him up and took him away. We were wondering what kind of policy this was... That the one who doesn't get involved gets picked up and taken away by State Security. Among the workers, you didn't know what you could afford."

"Mr Novák had an estate of thirty hectares. Later, when the communists seized it, the cooperative turned it into a farm. But at that time my mother used to go there to work. She did what was needed. One day my mother came home crying, so we asked her what had happened. So she told us that she had been in the field with others to pick up what hadn't been harvested. There were some potatoes left in the field. And then this Mr. Novak rode up on horseback and started whipping them with a whip, who came to steal in his field. My mother was crying because she couldn't bring anything from the field and cook for us."

"My parents said, 'The Red Army is coming,' so the Germans hurriedly gathered up and left. I don't know if the Americans knew it, but they dropped a bomb on the village square at Únanov. There was no more bombing. The Germans left and the Russians took their place. We weren't afraid anymore and we really took them as liberators. That is, until they antagonized us."