Alois Edr

„We were on standby in Radvanice at the main mine rescue station. It used to be in Lazy (nowadays Orlová-Lazy), then we would be seated at Radvanice. We waited on standby for the whole week, just in case something happened. And when something happened, we would go there. They said we were going someplace where this and that happened. The operational officer had already known what was going on and what to take along. And once they summoned us to the Fučík mine. It’s not operational any more, the shaft collapsed, I think, and there was a fire in one of the shafts. They sent us and off we went. From Karviná, we were used to seams [of coal and thus the height of the tunnels] of about three metres thick and we couldn’t find that place. We returned and some told us that it’s past a strip where there’s a water flowing. We had to go there. We carried our breathing apparatuses in front of us and went upwards with those and all our equipment up there. And there was that fire. The layer was some forty or fifty centimetres thik so we had to crawl. One guy was waiting for us there, Jan Balcar, he had such a big belly that he was not able to crawl through. We climbed up there, we were dripping wet because they were spraying it with water. The water was stirring and bubbling and we crawled through that water and there, past that, was that fire. [Note: translated verbatim, the spatial relations are unclear in the original.]”