Marta Dušánková

“When we worked in the factory where aircraft engines were produced, the boys worked in workshops and we sat there and we had to engrave marks on the work pieces and hand them over for inspection. Of course we were ruining the work, but we had a wonderful boss, a young German, who probably knew how it all was, and he always repaired the defects and then submitted the pieces for inspection. What was tragic about him was that he fell in love with one of our girls, but he dated a German girl there, Ula, who was a typical German. The lady owner of the factory made him make a decision: either he would break up with the girl and return to Ula, or he would be sent to the front. As a specialist he did not have to go to the front. But he did not give up Ula, and he was thus sent to the front. Two weeks later we received a telegram that he had been killed in combat. This was a tragedy.”

“Time was passing quickly and it was about to be over. We had been sent there for ten months. The boys from Kolín went home when the ten months were over. But we were still there. We thus drew lots to decide who would write the petition, and of course, it was me who got picked up to write a letter to minister Moravec. And so I wrote him a letter that we had been sent there for ten months and that there were boys from Kolín as well and they left precisely after ten months of work but we were still there. Meanwhile I used my leave permit and I went home. Right after I left I got a phone call from the girls that they had received an order to go home. I didn’t go back there anymore. I had left my bedding and all my stuff there, but I didn’t go there anymore. They were released because the minister had arranged everything so that we could return home. The letter from him was addressed to me, but I haven’t got it… I could have had a keepsake. We were then sent to the Troja neighbourhood in Prague to work in some factory there, it was still no end to all this. We worked there for a month or two.”

“In the factory there were Dutch and French people working in the same workshop with us. It was terrible. They stayed in the camp and I can still remember it vividly: they were cutting bread with a saw. They had an old and hard loaf of bread, and they used a saw to cut it and then they ate it. I befriended one of the girls and – now I can admit, I was a thief – there were two shops, two butchers and general stores, and they kept food stamps in small bowls there. We went to shop there. We needed to invent some pretext to make the shop assistant walk away for a moment. We therefore went there to buy minced meat, because he had to go to an adjacent room to prepare it. Meanwhile I would grab the food stamps in the bowl and we would go to the other shop to buy food using these food stamps. Out of the ten of us, the other eight girls didn’t know anything about it. But we were scared every time the door opened because we would think that they had come for us.”